molson, I think that rather than justifying/supporting/defending piracy, as far as I've read it, they're saying that piracy exists, will be very hard to eradicate, so perhaps the best method for solving the problem would be to find ways to minimize its effect.

Kind of like Hamsterdam in Season 3 of the Wire.

Yup. I get the arguments about "once I bought it, I should be able to do what I want with it", and even the "I have three computers at home, shouldn't I be able to play on all of them if I bought it?" arguments, but the belief that anyone has a RIGHT to these things is ludicrous.

I understand that, that's a good point on its own, but they don't seem to mesh up to me.

Piracy exists anyway, so intellectual property owners should find a way to manage it = Piracy's impact on the economy and property owners is minimal?

How does the latter support the former?

It just seems like an attempt to make the theives the good guys and the record companies the bad guys.

And while the posters here are trying to be subtle, I think, about their support for piracy, that's not the opinion that record companies are dealing with. The Pirate Bay is a pro-pirate adovacate. They are anti-copyright. And they're very influential. How are their actions not criminal? How are they the good guy?

So I guess my question would be, what premise is supported when people minimize the impacts of piracy? Are they just pointing out how poorly intellectual property owners manage their copyrights? Why do you care how someone else manages their own property (unless you feel an entitlement to it)? And if the piracy impacts are minimal, aren't the intellectual property owners actually doing a great job of protecting their property from crime?

I'm all for copyright owners deciding how they want to exercise their rights. The problem is, the recording industry continues to feel the need to justify its stance by blaming others for their own inadequacies, when information suggests that people who pirate music actual purchase quite a bit of it. IMO, they can't have it both ways. Either piracy is bad just because and people shouldn't do it - irrespective of the financial impact on them - or piracy/free acess can be beneficial to sales, so they should shut up about it and focus on sales models that make them the kinds of money they believe they should be making. They are the ones framing this as a "we're losing money because of piracy" argument, so I think it's appropriate to point out the problems with that causal link. But that's really beyond the threshold "is it bad or good" discussion, and I didn't post that article as justification for piracy.

I'm not going to respond to your points about minimizing the impacts of piracy since that's not my discussion. I think the impacts are probably in between what the two sides would argue, but probably closer to the companies' thoughts.

My only bone of contention in this whole thing is that The Pirate Bay, deplorable as what they do is, is being found guilty for pointing people in the direction of where they can commit a crime. It's like if I posted a list of drug dealer's phone numbers online, I would be found guilty of dealing drugs. That doesn't sit well with me, and the response of the "smirk test" brought up way on page one unnerves me a bit.

It's called "being an accessory".

If you run a Pirate-Bay type website for drug trafficking, listing contacts, helping to get people in touch with each other, and profitting off that, you can expect to be arrested for conspiracy to commit drug trafficking.

People think there's this criminal loophole there, but it just doesn't exist. If you buy the gun with the intention of someone else getting murdered with it, you're guilty of murder, even if you don't pull the trigger.

A topical question, then, should craigslist be found guilty of pimping?

Craiglist/Google are different than the pirate bay. I don't see how people can make that comparison with a straight face.

If Craiglist was 95% open prostitution, and took no steps to restrict the prostitution they were openly faciliating, they would absolutely be guilty of pimping. If ebay catered to the drug culture, and 95% of auctions were drug sales, and made no attempts to restrict those sales, they'd be taken down and be criminally liable (even though they're not selling drugs themselves). But since Craiglist is less than 1% massage services/stripping (that are often prostitution ads), and they cooperate with authorities, have some kind of policy about restricting prostitution, then it's not criminal. If they take steps to discourage prostitution, then they're not acting in furtherance of conspiracy of a criminal act.

dola,

I guess a related question then: Was Pirate Bay ever explicitly notified that specific torrents were in copyright violation and asked to take them down, to which they refused? If that's the case (and I don't know if it is) then I'm perfectly happy with them being convicted.

I'm not going to open this link at work, but it appears that not only do they get those letters, they flaunt them:

Legal threats against The Pirate Bay
The Pirate Bay - The world's largest BitTorrent tracker

I'm not trying to make the distinction morally, I'm trying to make it legally.

What's the breaking point? If 30% of craigslist posts were for illegal services? Who do we trust to decide which websites open to the public use are criminal and which just have a little criminal activity on them?

I don't see why you can't follow 'Hamsterdam' and law enforcement at the same time. There is nothing wrong with saying that the copyright should be protected and enforced, and simultaneously saying that the best way to reduce the amount of piracy occurring is through new economic mechanisms.

A combination of both of them would probably have the biggest effect. Reducing the cost to participate ethically and simultaneously increasing the penalty for misbehaving, will get you to an equilibrium faster than either alone.

-----

After piracy gets out of the mainstream, it will probably be easier to locate violators and enforce it, so smaller distributors might have a chance to run outside the big security machines.

You'd have to look up the criminal statute at issue. It won't give you a %, but it will tell you what's a illegal. The courts, through caselaw, have established what isn't a crime, and what is a crime. Everything in between in open to argument (there's lots of grey area in law).

And while a % would be nice to know, that's not realistic. It's more than %, that's just one factor. Two websites with 10% prostitution or drugs may have varying guilt if they vary in overt support for the criminal action/efforts to combat criminal activity.

With Pirate Bay it's easy. 99% illegal stuff, which is supported, defended, faciliated, and profitted from. Google is easy on the other side, being legal. Craiglist, definitely legal, but they could easily drift into dangerous waters if they were too lax on prostitution.

So, I take it from what you've been saying that you think that the onus of ensuring that no illegal activity is taking place on a website should be that website's responsibility? I'm willing to buy that if an appropriate authority (either the police, or a copyright holder) alerts someone to illegal activity on their site they should have a responsibility to remove it, but I'm not sure they should have to keep vigilant watch to make sure its never put up in the first place. I have to admit I've got a bit of libertarian streak in general, and especially when it comes to the internet.

Just as the company has a right to determine how they will sell it, the customer has a right to do what they want with it once they buy it.

People have a responsibility not to commit crime. It doesn't just fall on the authorities to prevent it.

It's pretty tough to bring criminal charges against somebody that simply wasn't vigilant enough themselves to prevent crime. That's not Pirate Bay though. Pirate bay is an active participant in crime. They're the criminal, they're not simply inadvertently making crime easier via their pursuit of an otherwise legal venture. They can try to come up with technical justifications that that's not the case, but they're not very convincing.

Facilitating crime, ignoring crime, not being vigilant enough about crime - those aren't the crimes. Those are merely evidence of criminal conpiracy. A criminal conpiracy is kind of a intangible idea. It's about an intent. Pirate Bay's intent is to faciliate distribution of pirated material. There's no one slam-dunk defense or damning fact. Not actually hosting the the pirated material doesn't automatically make them innocent. Making money on the site doesn't automatically make them guilty. Taking all the evidence together, provides evidence of their intent, and that's what makes the act criminal. They can claim that their have no such criminal intent, that they're merely operating a legal-neutral service. But the evidence to the contrary is overwhelming.

On the other hand, what's Google's intent? Craiglist? Like I said, craiglist is closer to being in dangerous waters. If they act to try to prevent or mitigate prostitution, that doesn't automatically make them innocent, but it's evidence that their intent is not criminal. But if Craiglist went on a big pro-prostitution campaign, and someone uncovered an internal document that described how they intentionally faciliate the sex trade - then the Craiglist CEO would be going up the river for a long time.

I could rent a house, which is a totally legal activity. But if the intent of that act was so that others could operate it as a drug house, that's a crime. Evidence of the intent might be if it could be shown I had knowledge of what was going on there, and didn't do anything about it. That's just EVIDENCE, I may have a darn could reason to keep quiet (maybe they threatened my life). On the other hand, telling the police about any drug activity that went on there would be pretty good evidence that my intent wasn't criminal. But telling them that I never myself exchanged drugs is not a defense (at best, it would be very weak evidence that I didn't have a criminal intent).

We talked about % of pirated content before, and that too, is merely evidence of that intent. 99% is pretty strong evidence of criminal intent. 1% is not. 10%? - then you'd probably want to see other evidence of intent.

And I said I understand those arguments: making backup copies, playing it on your home LAN, etc (there have been plenty of copy-protected multiplayer games that allow LAN clients to not have the disc in the drive, for example). All things that copy protection can interfere with that have a legitimate case of being "fair use" or whatever the current legal term is.

As long as "do what they want with it" doesn't imply you can give it to all your friends. That's where I'll argue with you.

Edit: Sorry, re-read my post. What I meant by "right to these things" was talking about the right to acquire music / games / videos, not the right to do some of these things once you own it. Sorry for the confusion. Yes, I think you should be able to do things with your personal copy that some copy-protection schemes prevent, but I don't think you should be able to acquire that personal copy in any way you choose at whatever price you choose. Maybe that will make more sense.

Looks like I need to quote myself from the first page:


In my opinion Craigslist is in a similar position to Google, although there are pending cases regarding prostitution and Craigslist's facilitation thereof. Again, though, unlike websites which openly list "escort" directories and use euphemisms for aspects of the sex trade, Craigslist has implemented ways for these postings to be removed, and has no clear intent to support the sex trade.

The "information suggests pirates buy music" is just plain silly. Sure they may buy some, but they also steal a ton. If they buy $10 worth a year, would they spend $50 if they weren't able to illegally download it for free?

The best source of information for the effect of piracy is in total music sales. They've fallen off the face of the Earth. PC video game developers have been dropping like flies. Piracy has a real toll on companies and livelihoods. Silly arguments with no real statistical evidence behind it have no merit in my book.

Got this in the mail today from Cory Doctorow:

Internet Evolution - The Big Report - Big Entertainment Wants to Party Like It's 1996

It's a long article, so here's the intro only:

Big Entertainment Wants to Party Like It's 1996
Introduction
Written by Cory Doctorow
4/21/2009 Post a comment
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The entertainment industry wants to retreat to the comfort of 1996. It was a good year for them. CDs were selling briskly, but no one had figured out how to rip them and turn them into MP3s yet. Music fans were still spending money to buy CD versions of music they owned on LP. DVDs had just been released, and movie fans were spending money to buy DVDs for movies they already owned on VHS.

And most importantly, the laws regulating copyright and technology were almost entirely designed by the entertainment industry. They could write anydamnfoolthing and get it passed in Congress, by the UN, in the EU.

Private agreements with electronics companies guaranteed that all new devices were crippled: Remember the Sony Minidisc players that could record sound digitally, but could only output it on the headphone jack, meaning that you couldn't just record your kid's first words and digitally transfer them to your computer for safe keeping?

1996 is gone, and good riddance.

In 2009, the world is populated by people who no longer believe that "Thou shalt sell media on plastic discs forever" came down off the mountain on two stone tablets. It's populated by people who find the spectacle of companies suing their own customers by the thousands indefensible. It's populated by activists who've figured out that the Internet is worth saving and that the entertainment industry is prepared to destroy it.

And the entertainment industry hasn't figured that out, and that's why they're doomed.

To be fair, while this is significant, the other one has been driver and support issues. Everyone complains about buggy games (and I won't deny games have bugs and many support calls are legitimate, that's not the point), but from a developer perspective it's also hard to deal with overclockers, buggy drivers, viruses, etc. If a game crashes, it's the developer's fault, no matter WHAT is going on on the target machine. The support costs are astronomical compared to those on consoles, and you're often troubleshooting something that has nothing to do with you aside from the fact that your game was the one that exposed it.

My favorite story was back in the old days where one user had 3 separate types of RAM in his computer (a stick of PC-66, one of PC-100, and I think the third was a stick of PC-100 with different timings) and he was overclocking to boot. My worst time was when DirectX 8 shipped and it took nearly a year before reliable AGP drivers were available for most motherboards. Try explaning to an end user that they need a MOTHERBOARD driver update, let alone a video card driver update.

You periodically have issues with the consoles, but they are much less frequent, limited in scope, and you know exactly who to talk to and have a direct line to them.

That article is a bit of a sweeping brush. There's a middle-ground here. The key is many entertainment companies are moving towards it (Steam, iTunes, Netflix, etc) but pirates still want to steal it all.

This has more to do with the incredible growth in consoles over the past decade than the PC market itself. Its hard to get numbers from Steam and D2D, but the analysis I've seen suggests that PC game sales have held steady over the past several years. Physical media sales are way down, but its estimated that at least 50% of all PC sales are now done digitally.

Sorry, that's bullshit. Now that you can buy singles online, no one buys a $18 album ($10-$15 online) for 2 good songs and 12 filler songs. The record companies didn't see this coming, and are trying to blame piracy as the sole factor, completely neglecting the fact that people now spend $2 for the 2 good songs on an album, and completely ignore the songs they don't want.

I'd say that it's this, more then piracy. (Not that piracy isn't a factor, mind you, but it's grossly exaggerated)

That's kind of an ironic statement.

But there are a lot more artists out there these days and it's much easier to put together an album. While they are losing money on full album sales, they shouldn't be losing much on total music sold. I probably spend as much as I used to on music but now have it across many more artists than I used to.

I do agree with you though that full album sales have hurt. But I also know I don't think I have a friend who has paid for music in years that have their iPods filled with stuff.

Or you could say the reverse.

I disagree. People are just not spending the same amount on music, period. I do agree that the newest stuff is being pirated the most, mind you, but also, we do not exactly have a ton of great artists right now, and where the paid services shine is the back catalogue, stuff that you won't find in any torrent because it's more then a year old. That is a majority of the music being purchased out there.

I really applaud outside the box thinking services like lala (have I gushed too much about their service? :D). There needs to be more of it. Remember, this is an industry that just a few years ago, sued mp3.com out of business because they had a service that allowed people to listen to MP3's they had ripped from their own CD's!!!!!

The Recording industry, like the computer game industry with consoles, had the customer model change out from underneath them, and basically, were whistling dixie on the train track, and refused to get off, and now are being run over by the speeding train.

Cory Doctorow doesn't make his money by finding the middle ground. :D

I have a theory that because of piracy, the quality of musicians being put out are poorer. My feeling is that they are avoiding musicians that play into the demographics most likely to pirate music (males 18-34) and instead playing to demographics that are somewhat internet literate, but not enough to be able to use torrents. So you end up with music targeted toward teenage girls.

If you take a look at the Billboard charts, it's filled with bubble gum pop songs and crappy hip-hop. You won't find many hard rock or alternative bands anymore.

Because of Piracy, there's lesser artists out there? I find that VERY hard to believe, to say the least (I cancelled the first two things I said). More like the RIAA companies figured that the bubble would always be there, and focused on the bubble area, and then when the bubble popped, had no where to go.

So explain Debbie Gibson, Tiffany, and much of the mid-1980's to me. ;)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009...buy-more-music

Thought this was interesting, considering they made people provide receipts for this study. Don't shoot the messenger..

Latest news from Sweden is that the trial might have to be re-done. The Judge sits on the board for an organization called "Swedish Association For the Protection of Industrial Rights", along with the prosecution main lawyers Monique Wadstedt and Henrik Ponten.

Linky: Was The Pirate Bay Judge Biased?

I would think that, if these guys were as purely evil as they are portrayed to be, that the government (and industry) would do everything they could to make sure the prosecution went down without a hitch. Not leave a pretty glaring conflict of interest angle right in the middle of it.

I don't think anyone referred to them, or pirates in general, as "purely evil", or made such implications. Why do you feel the need to constantly exaggerate your point? That's usually a sign that one thinks their argument is weak.

Constantly? I've not done it nearly as much as you guys. I'm just trying to keep up.

If true, this is A) Really freaking stupid of the judge and prosecutors not to see this giant mine that will explode in their faces, B) Yes, cause for at least a new trial. (And considering some of the stuff they pulled during the trial, where they changed the charges a couple times around, really eye-opening).