Right on brother. +1

Entertainment is one of the last things the US exports.

To think gov is just going to let it fly out the back door unpaid for, is delusional.

twisting copyright laws in anti-competitive and free speech-destroying ways.

Hyperbole much?

What free speech has this guy stopped? The free speech of piracy? Not really protected speech, is it?

How has he supported anti-competitive things? By working to shut down pirate sites and attempting to hold YouTube responsible for the methods they used to grow their business on the backs of others?

Come on Mike, your post sounds like the sour grapes of a little child who lost a game of tag in the playground.

Masnick knows the gig is up.

His MO from here on out will be to describe all piracy enforcement efforts as assaults on the First Amendment.

Entertainment *is* the last thing this country produces, sadly. It’s on its last legs, and the Powers-That-Be are just trying to squeeze a little more juice out before it falls apart.

Actually, I foresee one more big US export in the near future: young, intelligent expats.

The US is solidifying its position as a nation on a downward spiral – what nation would sacrifice its entire economic well- being and technological advancement to the benefit of one economically minor interest group? That’s just insane.

Who would have believed that Obama would turn out to be worse than Bush? Who knows how many technologies will never see the light of day in America, how much business it will lose as a result of its anti-technological policies?

It’s like the technological Taliban has taken power in America.

Umm, apparently you mistook me for someone who supports Palin. I wouldn’t support her for anything except perhaps meter maid.

Perhaps you want to take your head out of your freetard ass and try again?

If you refuse to address me, Anonymous, you’ll only be showing that I’m right. Besides, are you so much of a coward that you can’t even put a name behind your crap? You’re all bravado and no proof, which means you have nothing. What do you think you’re accomplishing here? Nobody believes you. Nobody’s going to change their mind. So you serve no purpose here. If this is what you’re paid to do by your industry masters, it’s a pitiful and useless job.

“Unless you are going to run all your own fiber, and set up your own alternative network, you are still on the same pipes. Doesn’t matter how you try to hide.”

Technology progresses as enforcement progresses. Zero sum game here.

“Sneakernet? Knock yourself out. I will be particularly interested to see which idiots are paid to swim the atlantic to take things to Europe.”

That’s what planes are for.

“Darknets? Please… go now. Go hide, and don’t tell the rest of the public how to get in. That would resolve much of the piracy issue immediately.”

Never answered that one. Guess deluding yourself leaves much to be desired on actually answering questions.

“Attacks like yours suggest you are joining Mike in understanding that the gig is up. Anger. It’s the first step in the process.”

Don’t think anyone took it as a demand save you. But if you have nothing on the subject, all the vitriol does nothing to prove your point.

Actually, abolishing copyright strikes me as more of a right wing thing. Free markets and all that.

When someone acts like a jackwagon, they get called out. Sorry.

The person suggested that I was putting forward violent rhetoric and suggested I supported the shootings in Arizona. That is offensive. He should be lucky I only called him a freetard, rather than some of the other choice terms I could come up with.

Actually, I call the Masnick followers sheeple. They don’t read past what is presented, they just look at the feast of free stuff in front of them and ignore logic as to why it is bad. They will stand over the spoiled feast soon enough, making themselves sick on the rotting remains. That is their problem, not mine 🙂

If anything, using it shows a guilty mind, a desire to hide something. It’s a big loser all around.

So your position is that because they are “great american companies” and “supporting the US economy” it’s fine for the content providing companies to read all your emails, check your browser history open your bank account, get your medical records, purchase histories, sexual preferences, notes from your shrink etc whenever they want them so they properly ensure that the electronic communication in question doesn’t contain anything copyrighted?

Good to know. I think there’s a number of rights holders and content creators post here so why don’t you start by emailing Nina Paley your details to follow up on? Or does it only count when you have a certain amount of money? What’s the magic number ( and what politician should it be sent to) to obtain access to that clearly needed service in your little world of absolutism?

Jay, darknet means “not in the public eye”. If piracy stays out of the public eye, most of the public won’t participate. If piracy was cut in half because it was no longer public, no longer easy to find on search engines, and no longer just a walk in and take what you want sort of deal, things would be better for everyone.

Go play on your darknet, stay out of the light. Take the turds on the TPB and places like that with you. Piracy wouldn’t go to zero, but you would stop dragging new people in the door.

*rolls eyes*

Everyone here thinks with their own minds. They have their own thoughts about the morality of piracy and a government using copyright law to enforce draconian laws, all in “protecting” artists.

If you look, there’s a LOT of artists that don’t support this. 50 Cent called it a marketing strategy. Joss Stone won’t sue her fans. Shakira actaully defended piracy.

The ones being made redundant are the ones who took advantage of artists.

If anything, follow who is complaining the loudest and you’ll find the weakest position.

…

You do realize that actually makes no sense? If anything, what the government is doing, along with the record labels is going to cause MORE people to seek out what the fuss is.

It’s as if you want to say McCarthyism helped Hollywood by blackmailing a few artists for being “Communist”.

*Facepalm*

Did you even READ the darknet paper? Go ahead, it is at http://msl1.mit.edu/ESD10/docs/darknet5.pdf. Note that darknet does not mean “not in the public eye” at all – in fact, the authors consider Napster of all things as an example of a darknet.

And a major eyeroll for you for hoping copyright, one of the principals the US was founded upon, is going to go away. Most amusing.

The ones being made redundant are the ones who took advantage of artists.

And that of course, would be you, Freetardo.

I’m pretty sure he was referring to the Hollywood accounting. Remember that little phenomenon?

Here’s a refresher:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting

OK I’ll say it again and use smaller words.

The only way to completely stop copyright infringement whether it is on the “same wire” or not is to read and analyse every single communication everywhere because otherwise it is a random series of 1’s and 0’s. You have no way of knowing whether it contains something that it shouldn’t. Assuming such a thing is even possible it would require the analysis or many if not all things that are nothing to do with the subject at hand because as you point out it uses “the same pipes, the same networks”. Oh and suggesting encryption is in and of itself suspicious is fun too – the very companies you support use it extensively… sell it in fact.

To be fair, I read him as he is claiming. I thought it was a potshot at Palin which I tried to ignore (like most politics).

Yeah right. Obama gave the to Homeland job to Nappy. She was one of Arizona’s worst governors. Did nothing for the state, did nothing about illegals (pandered to them even and fought the law enforcement that did do something about them), etc. She did nothing to deserve the post she’s in now.

I note, Anonymous, that you still have not given me the evidence I asked for. It only proves me right. Do it or give a complete retraction of everything you have ever said on this site. Now.

Hollywood has always supported Democrats, so no surprise that once in power the dems favor Hollywood… I don’t think deer hunter Palin would really care about Hollywood’s problems, as Hollywood will never make films remotely in line with her “values”.
Now if Hollywood and Palin could just destroy each other that would be the best of both worlds 🙂

You clearly don’t understand… Many of the people here want IP legislation changed. We don’t feel the laws are just. It’s not a matter of wanting things for free. The laws have changed since they were written… and they should. Times change. The problem I have with the current legislation is that it favors the *IAA, not the public or the artists. Just a few individuals who take the cash from their coffers and purchase more slanted legislation. You can try to twist the reasoning but in the end, you’re an industry shill with no facts cited to support your beliefs.

Sneakernet works for things which are fairly common, things which, say, one person in a hundred already has. I watched Sneakernet in operation, back in the 1980’s, before some people here were born. At that date, Sneakernet carried things like Lotus 1-2-3, a spreadsheet program which cost a couple of hundred dollars. It also carried Microsoft QuickBasic, which had not yet been bundled into MS-DOS. There was always a locally-known “pack rat,” who traded for programs, whether he needed them or not, and could supply one with a copy of any program in moderately common use, subject to the usual quid pro quo. Microsoft never really did figure out how to sell freestanding software to individuals, in competition with Sneakernet. What it did do was to figure out how to sell bundled packages to OEM’s and corporate IT departments.

The RIAA is committed to a business model in which there are only a thousand songs or so. That means that to make their accustomed revenue (let us notionally estimate it at ten billion dollars), each song has to earn an average of at least ten million dollars, and sell at least twenty million copies. These twenty million copies are distributed over the billion or so inhabitants of the developed countries, because obviously the third-world countries and China do not pay royalties. That means that one person in fifty has a copy of a typical song.

So, if you have three hundred kids on a school playground, who probably have a rather higher propensity to consume recorded music than the general population, it is a reasonable assumption that ten or twenty of them will have copies of any song in the top thousand. If those three hundred kids hold an efficient swap meet, they will all have the full thousand songs. I suppose that there would probably be trading specialists, kids who knew all about every song, and what it was worth, and who would trade among themselves at a higher level than they traded with the mass of kids in the schoolyard. A playground with three hundred kids might have twenty specialists.

Of course, you can construct a two-tier model, reflecting the fact that kids do not all go to the same school system. The catchment areas of the Catholic parochial school system do not precisely correspond to those of the public schools, so kids who are neighbors at home might well be going to different schools. So new music can jump, virus-like, from one schoolyard to the next.

Darknet maybe isn’t the best term for what I described. Anyway, this is the kind of “Darknet” that I meant:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freenet

you mean trying to return to the days when talented independent artists had no avenue or palpable hope for making a sustainable income on their own

Not at all. Your answer is the problem, because you are mixing the rights of the artist to distribute their work as they please with piracy, which is the distribution of work against their rights.

If independent / up and coming / never going anywhere artists want to spread their work for free, more power to them. Have a nice time, enjoy it. Knock yourselves out. Copyright does not in any way stop that from happening. That is their choice as artists.

Where there is a problem is artists (or the people they have signed contracts with) who don’t want their music distributed this way. This is their choice, and people should respect it.

It isn’t an all or nothing world as you try to paint it. If new artists want to work differently from the existing music industry, they are free to do so. They just shouldn’t be dragging people who aren’t willing to work that way down to their level. That sucks.

One thing for sure, you will have a job for a long time to come, because they aren’t going anywhere. Until you accept that basic concept, you are in trouble.

I understand, your job depends on piracy. Congrats, now I undestand why you have a very one sided view of the world.

That’s just pointless… Why do you need it? Let the facts speak for you.

Oh, come on you condescending fucktard. As if the old way is superior, and it’s “dragging down” anyone to operate in the new reality.

You don’t want your clients’ IP distributed? Keep it to your fucking self you entitled prick.

The underlying concepts of sneakernet have been around forever under different names. It didn’t really bug artists that much in the 70s and it’s not going to bug us that much in the future.

You bring up the second amendment, and you state that you “feel violent towards them” in reference to IP maximalists. In my world, that sounds like someone considering “actions”.

let me answer that very carefully and slowly, so you understand.

All internet communication has patterns. There are different patterns for web site visits, for watching a you tube video, for getting your mail, for chatting on skype, and yes, for sharing files. You don’t even have to look at the content to know one from the other. packet sizes, connection patterns, number of incoming and outgoing requests, packet format, etc. Without looking at the actual content or trying to assemble stuff, the actions are actually pretty easy to see.

Most people surfing the web have few incoming connection, and have some outgoing (typically 4 to 10 at a time), and generally all to the same places. Someone using P2P will have many incoming connections from a wide variety of places, they will have outgoing connections to a wide variety of locations, and the packet sizes will all be very similar in nature.

After that, once you know who is using file sharing, you can figure out from the actual packets the protocols and such being used, and then even potentially determine what is being shared, either through packet inspection or simply by requesting packets until you have enough to see what is inside.

That is assuming the worse. In reality, once you have the IP address of someone who is sharing (because there is always some form of announce to let people find you in the P2P network) then you are easy enough to spot. You don’t think that the copyright holders won’t almost be part of those “dark” nets?

So I’ll say it again: Until you stop using the network infrastructure, and until you stop allowing anyone you don’t personally know into the circle of friends, you will always be open to be caught. Accept and understand it, it is a fact not a fiction.

Edison got a bad patent, no different from some of the patents issued today. We don’t toss out the entire system because of some exceptional cases.

“Widespread lawbreaking isn’t tolerable in our society, no matter how much you try to justify it.”

This isn’t promoting the progress, its promoting the police state.

I love your logic. By that standard, arresting drug dealers is bad because it doesn’t promote progress for the dealers.

Come off it.

Enforcing the laws doesn’t stop progress. They create the stability required for progress. You are pretending that enforcing the laws would stop everything. It just doesn’t. You have nothing, nada, zilch to support your position. You do however have a job you want to keep. Now that we know what you do for a living, it sort of shades you comments. Now we know that you profit from the failures brought on by widespread lawbreaking. I guess for you, that is progress.

And you, AC, fail to understand that when the overwhelming majority of a population knowingly disregards a law, it is much more likely that said law is bad and unreasonable (ie Prohibition) and is much wiser to recognize that fact than to persist in the sad delusion that laws are infallible. They are not. It is not wrong to ignore a law that is wrong. That may be a strange concept to you, but it is true.

“Quite simple, the tide is turning (actually started about 18 months ago now), and continues to flow against the pirate world. It was fun while it lasted, but there is little tolerance for it anymore.”

There may be little tolerance in the RIAA/MPAA worlds, but you?re hardly seeing the general public on the streets protesting about these terrible crimes. Those not directly involved in on side of the debate or the other hardly seem to care at all, and they?d probably be in the majority.

“Once it became a drag on the economy (and the economy as a whole fell into the dumper), it became time for the government to start acting.”

Wow, to even hint at conflating the GFC and copyright infringement is ridiculous. And there is absolutely no independent evidence that copyright infringement actually hurts any country?s economy. This evidence has been asked for countless times but never provided.

“Widespread lawbreaking isn’t tolerable in our society, no matter how much you try to justify it.”

Actually, societies have a long history of tolerating widespread breaking of laws that are felt to be wrong, immoral and outdated. Judging by the scale of copying of movies and music, a very significant proportion of society believes this to be the case with copyright laws. This is no surprise considering the most prominent supporters of these laws are the recording and film industry middlemen who have gone out of their way to rip off both artists and consumers for decades, and continue to fight so hard against what their customers actually want.

Deep packet inspection already occurs everyday with your activity.

Might want to keep up.

So does bad italian food. Thankfully we don’t shut down all the restaurants because one idiot overcooks the pasta.

“IP Maximalist” could be a statement of fact: the person in question believes that the expansion of IP to the maximum is a good thing. It is also quite value-neutral: if you believe unrestricted IP is evil, you will believe being a “IP Maximalist” is evil, and if you believe unrestricted IP is good, you will believe being a “IP Maximalist” is good.

No, people move to a different restaurant where that doesn’t happen. And when the health inspector shuts one place down, people may spend their money on pizza or tacos instead.

Heph, calm down. Rub your ears. Remember these words:

“He’s only a troll…”

Woosa. WOOOSA! Now let’s get your heart rate down…

Do it with me. *Breathe in*

And out…

*Exhales*

There we go!

Now… Let’s remember. The same RIAA/MPAA have gotten practically everything they’ve wanted. The only thing they didn’t get was third party liability, which Verizon shot down. They can’t compete with free and have done a large number of things such as bully normal citizens, spend $90 million on legislation, and negotiating three strikes laws with Biden.

But beware the spoiled child that gets everything they want. No matter how much collusion is occurring between corporate and government interest, it can’t end well. Main thing that will happen is our government becomes so slanted that revolt will surely follow as people become fed up with the political maneuvering.

Shoudl be fun to see.

WOOOSA!

“First off “constant extensions” just doesn’t reflect the 5 changes made in 200 years. “

Yes it does.

The result is that nothing ever makes its way to the public domain anymore because every time something was supposed to, the law got extended.

“Second, there is no proof that progress isn’t promoted.”

It’s hard to prove a negative, but even so there is virtually no evidence that IP promotes the progress and there is plenty of evidence that it only hinders progress. You can start here

http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/general/intellectual/against.htm

Your beliefs that IP promotes the progress is no different than someone saying they believe that magic, undetectable, elephants move the earth around the sun. There is no proof that they don’t, but your statement is unfalsifiable and hence it’s probably false.

Not only that, but since IP robs me of my rights and it certainly does cause economic harm (monopolies are bad for the economy), so the burden is on you to prove its justification, not on me to prove that its lack is justified.

Heh, I remember my parents having reel to reel taping parties. “Tom’s got Mamas and Papas, I’ve got Sgt. Peppers, Bruce has Bob Dylan…”

Reel to reel…those things were ungainly. External drives are so svelt.

Please, please tell me that you do not work in IT nor have any decision making input in relation to an IT department anywhere. You stay over there with your “facts” that only you seem privvy to and I’ll just carry on with my “fiction” over here on Reality Street thanks.

Your argument there boils down to approximately the same as the way the British Empire conquered the world largely through the use of flags.

You have it backwards – developing nations struggle because america and other developed nations got there first and slammed the door in everyone else’s face declaring the games closed. Intellectual property laws are one of the tools used to do this. It costs significant money to compete in an IP-laden marketplace, which poorer countries simply do not have because of the restrictions put in their way. Blaming it all on IP laws would of course be overly simplistic, but it is a significant factor.

As for China, you better brush up on your Mandarin because it looks to me like they’ve jumped in with both feet and learned to play to win and they already own a significant part of the american economy (as well as many others). Were I you I would also look up the phrase “hoist by your own petard” because that outcome is far more likely than your utopian vision.

I’m also impressed by the way you manage to convince yourself that China’s growth without paying any attention to IP laws in some way means that IP laws are good. Do you think that, after growing hugely since the mid 80’s and having been the fastest growing enconomy on the planet for what 15-20 years without bothering with IP laws, their sudden foray into the area indicates they suddenly want to become good corporate citizens? The only difference between China and the “IP poor” nations you describe is that China is big enough to have totally ignored the US’s ranting and raving about copyright and patents until they were ready toplay. Most other countries the US can bully into submission.

Reality trumps opinion? Excellent, go find some and present it. You know? Facts, data, evidence? Otherwise my “opinion” is just as valid as yours and at least has some connection to observation and doesn’t seek to distort or put words in other people’s mouths.

oh look, it’s creepy internet psycho guy…

Oh you’re lying and twisting things around again, aren’t you Mike?

Tell us, why are you such a supporter of piracy?

Seems like your advertisers and those you present to should know about this. We’ll have to work on that next.

(not to mention, the fields where innovation has occurred the most in the U.S. in more recent years has been fields where IP was strongly ignored, like tech. Though now patent trolls are starting to jump in on the tech bandwagon and now more tech is developed elsewhere. But if you look at pharma, the pharma industry in the U.S. is one of the least, if not the least, innovative and patents are very deeply ingrained in the U.S. pharma industry. Most medical advancements are now occurring in other countries that aren’t so strict on patents, like Japan).

“But good public policy isn’t made on short term gains, it is made in long term strategic moves that make you stronger, even if it hurts you a little today. “

I agree, hence we should get rid of patents. It helps us a lot today and tomorrow, but it hurts the lazy rich people (like patent trolls) that want to make money money without conducting any R&D, contributing anything of value to society, or doing any work. Who cares about them.

(and why is it not the U.S.? Partly because we’re too busy suing each other over ridiculous patents on very obvious ideas. Hence, all our money goes to the uninnovative lawyers and much less of it goes towards actual innovation).