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And Manning went to jail for revealing government secrets about government crimes. And Snowden cannot return home because he revealed that people are being spie

• tormeh 12y ago
  Wait wait. You're telling me Sunde is comparable to Snowden and Manning? Wat.
  • Quequau 12y ago
    The comment you're replying to defines both how Sunde's, Snowden's, & Manning's actions are different and provides context for the very limited comparison being made. If you don't agree, you should just argue your point because your straw man is just pathetic.
  • cturner 12y ago
    There is a watertight rights basis for opposing copyright. Copyright is a major structural threat to our freedoms. Our governments are founded generally on rights, which extend from a general principle of live-and-let-live. Copyright is an anti-right. Each time it comes into effect, it removes rights away from everyone except the copyright holder. You might say - that's just words. But it's not. Both in software and law, when you have permissions systems that mix up positive and negative rights with one side ruining the other one. That is what we see with copyright. A continuing encroachment on our positive rights on the basis of the state's desire to enforce the anti-right. The state will invade your house, jail and deport you... because of things you're doing with publicly released information and magnetic signals in the privacy of your own home. Once a positive right has been eroded by a single case of an anti-right winning, that serves as precedent for removing it in other cases. Have a think about it the next time you're working on a permission system and are tempted to create a permission that denies a right to someone. As you follow it through, you'll find you've created an unholy mess. Stick to positive rights. Update: hi, haters. Feel free to be constructive, too.
    • rayiner 12y ago
      > Our governments are founded generally on rights, which extend from a general principle of live-and-let-live. Copyright is an anti-right. Each time it comes into effect, it removes rights away from everyone except the copyright holder. Every "right" is an "anti-right." It's a restriction on what other people can do. Your right to bodily integrity is a restriction on my natural freedom to do whatever I want with my environment, which might include you. My right to protect my copyrighted work is a restriction on your same natural freedom. Now obviously punching someone in the face is worse than using the fruits of their labor without their permission, but I don't think the two things are qualitatively different.
      • cturner 12y ago
        If you accept the principle of live-and-let-live (raised above), there's a chasm between what constitutes a right and anti-right. If you don't accept live and let live, you've got some explaining to do. It goes back thousands of years, it's well-entrenched in the new testament (defines women as being equal to men; repeatedly scorns class-based rights) and then reiterated in each of the various rights documents that have helped shape western culture since then.
    • happyscrappy 12y ago
      You don't have some fucking inalienable right to my code. If I choose to open source it fine. Just because some cracker asshole gets a copy of it doesn't make it a right.
      • lmm 12y ago
        You have it backwards. You don't have some inalienable right to government-backed control over what I do with my copy of some code. The original will always be yours, but my copy is mine, and actually I do have a close-to-inalienable right to do whatever I want to with my own property.
        • waterlesscloud 12y ago
• hackerboos 12y ago
  I wouldn't put Sunde in the same category as Snowden and Manning. The Pirate Bay isn't some noble cause like the latter two. It did have a minor effect of disrupting the industry and accelerating the inevitable change in business model for the film and movie industry.
  • the8472 12y ago
    > The Pirate Bay isn't some noble cause Consider it as a litmus test for free speech. Providing links to pirated content, not even the content itself, can easily be seen as free speech.
    • hackerboos 12y ago
      I think you're really stretching it there. Freedom of speech is the political right to communicate one's opinions and ideas using one's body and property to anyone who is willing to receive them. Not sharing hashcodes to copyrighted works over the internet.
      • the8472 12y ago
        It stretches both ways. Think of other things that are legally considered free speech, things like corporate campaign spending.
      • stelonix 12y ago
        Somehow you see "links to hashes" as stretching freedom of speech and the ability to arbitrarily ban hashes in strings as the way it's supposed to be? I believe you and the parent post have fundamentally different views of what's right, just and moral, and any discussion between you and him/her or anyone else with the same views will lead to nothing.
        • icebraining 12y ago
          I believe you and the parent post have fundamentally different views of what's right, just and moral, and any discussion between you and him/her or anyone else with the same views will lead to nothing. Copyright discussions in a nutshell. That's why I only play for sport.
• deleted 12y ago
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• k-mcgrady 12y ago
  >> "I support TPB's cause. I believe that non-profit sharing of information should be free." And how should the people who take the time to create that 'information' be compensated?
  • tomp 12y ago
    How are the people who created Facebook compensated? I see no reason why ad-based free distribution couldn't be used for e.g. music and movies. People want convenience more than they want free - nobody uses Diaspora, everybody uses Facebook. Also, there is a lot of money to be earned by selling concerts, cinema performances, memorabilia... (I also wouldn't oppose some reasonably short copyright term, e.g. from a few months to a few years, that would allow authors to more effectively monetize e.g. cinema.)
    • davidw 12y ago
      > I see no reason why ad-based free distribution couldn't be used for e.g. music and movies. It could be; whether it's ideal or not is another question: * It likely wouldn't make as much money as having people pay for it. * Imagine how much product placement there would be. If you think it's bad enough now...
    • Donzo 12y ago
      Do you believe that content creators should have some say in how their work is distributed? Should they be able to choose whatever monetization system they feel is most appropriate for their work?
      • icebraining 12y ago
        Creators should have complete say in how their work is to be distributed and monetized, within the confines of the law. That doesn't tell us what the law should be, though.
        • the8472 12y ago
          "Their work" presumes ownership. Information does not have inherent ownership, unlike physical objects which can only be controlled one / a few people at a time.
• waterlesscloud 12y ago
  Cool. Please link to online repository of everything you've ever produced, under any circumstances, for any purpose.
  • icebraining 12y ago
    Why? Nobody is saying that copyright holders should be forced to distribute their work for free. Only that people, after having acquired copies, should be able to share it with others. If you want to distribute copies of all the work I've ever published, or work made by me and published by the company I work for, you're free to do so. It's all under Free licenses.
    • waterlesscloud 12y ago
      I specifically said everything produced, under any circumstances. Not just work. Everything. After all, if you believe in the free sharing of information...
      • icebraining 12y ago
        You're still confusing "freedom to share" with "obligation to share". Being for the free sharing of information and choosing to not publish some stuff is completely coherent. Nobody says copyright holders should be forced to publish their works.
        • waterlesscloud 12y ago
          So you support spreading the hacked nude photos of celebs? Once someone obtains a copy they should be free to share? And "Nobody says copyright holders should be forced to publish their works." should be a warning flag to you. Once you get to a position that twisty, you should think to yourself there's probably something wrong with it.
          • the8472 12y ago
            Those celeb photos do not need copyright to be protected from distribution. They need the right to privacy, because that's what's being harmed there. Copyright just gets used as a tool for takedown because commercial interests have driven the law to make it a much sharper and more immediately applicable tool than privacy laws.
• gedrap 12y ago
  >>> sharing of information But what TPB mainly distributed, was not information, it was products. And they are not essential products, you can live just fine without TV series or movies. People don't die because they can't play their favourite video game. It's like saying designer clothes should be free. Information should be shared without profit, yeah, that's what wikipedia is doing fine. But video games are not information, so are TV shows, movies, etc. They are products which cost money to produce. It doesn't make economical sense to give it away for free hoping to get money from ads or whatever. Mobile games do that, and mostly they are unplayable without purchasing credits, etc. Even then, the quality is often very poor. You can point to open source, but people producing open source software are minority of all engineers. What you are saying might be morally 'right' but unfortunately being morally right doesn't pay the rent, bills and food.
  • higherpurpose 12y ago
    > It's like saying designer clothes should be free. I wonder if it's not more like "designer cloths shouldn't be copyrighted" - which is actually true in the fashion world. And because of that tens if not hundreds of millions of people can get "cheap cloths" that look good.
    • gedrap 12y ago
      Well, yes, but you can't download clothes using torrents ;) Similar idea would be that ideas of movies and video games should not be copyrighted. IANAL, but there are many many similar movies and video games and don't think there are any copyright infringements unless you create a video game with almost identical name, etc.
      • pbhjpbhj 12y ago
        >there are many many similar movies and video games and don't think there are any copyright infringements // That's because they're copying the ideas and not the implementation, copyright protects implementations ("works") and not the ideas behind them (at least that's the intention). Similar names would be trademark law rather than copyright FWIW.
• LordKano 12y ago
  Sometimes I need to remind people that Dr. King and Gandhi also went to jail because they did things that were illegal. People should ask themselves whether or not the law is right. I think that the question here is a very complicated one. One can support copyright status quo but still have a problem with the heavy handed tactics being used against TPB. If we follow their logic to it's inevitable conclusion, we could find ourselves in a place where "Unauthorized reviews" could be considered copyright infringement.