Sometimes 'Piracy' And Freedom Look Remarkably Similar
from the and,-no,-that's-not-a-defense-of-piracy dept
I’ve complained in the past about The Pirate Party’s name, which I think does the party a serious disservice. It may work in the short-term, but I have my doubts about its long-term efficacy. While the Pirate Party’s leaders continue to defend the name, I still think it gets people focused on the issue of copyright much more than basic freedoms — which really does seem to be the core of the Party’s agenda. Still, there are times when I can see the reasoning, because all too often “piracy” looks quite a lot like “freedom.” Take, for example, this nifty contrast highlighted by Casey Rae-Hunter, from the Future of Music Coalition (hardly a “piracy defender”), where he notes that two separate projects, the PirateBox and the FreedomBox appear remarkably similar.
The “PirateBox” is an open source project to build self-contained file-sharing devices that people can set down, turn on and have a remote file sharing system, totally separate from those who might seek to control it.
The similarities between the two projects are pretty obvious as you dig into both. Take, for example, the descriptions:
PirateBox utilizes Free, Libre and Open Source software (FLOSS) to create mobile wireless communications and file sharing networks where users can anonymously chat and share images, video, audio, documents, and other digital content.
And…
Freedom Box exists to provide people with privacy-respecting technology alternatives in normal times, and to offer ways to collaborate safely and securely with others in building social networks of protest, demonstration, and mobilization for political change in the not-so-normal times.
Freedom Box software is built to run on hardware that already exists, and will soon become much more widely available and much more inexpensive. “Plug servers” and other compact devices are going to become ubiquitous in the next few years, serving as “media centers,” “communications centers,” “wireless routers,” and many other familiar and not-so-familiar roles in office and home.
It seems that there are times when “piracy” looks an awful lot like “freedom.”
Filed Under: freedom, freedombox, piracy, piratebox
Comments on “Sometimes 'Piracy' And Freedom Look Remarkably Similar”
So, who’s got the patent on this idea?
Calling a tail a leg doesn’t mean that your dog can walk on it.
Both of the boxes look remarkably like “contributory copyright violations” in the making.
Re: Re:
If and when the infringement occurs then you’ll have a legal case against said infringer.
Bring your evidence to court and follow due process and no one gets hurt.
Keep running your mouth/industry like a dictator in Africa and there WILL be a revolution that you and your ilk will be none to happy about.
There is no need to invent boogey men when there are plenty of them out there already including yourself.
/Troll feeding
By the same analogy (and more accurately) you can call a leg a tail but it’s still going to be used for walking on.
Stop making stupid analogies and stop assuming that someone’s right to enforce universal copyright of their own work is greater than someone else’s right to free speech.
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“Both of the boxes look remarkably like “contributory copyright violations” in the making.”
Uh, what? They’re just hardware. How arey they contributing to copyright violations anymore than an, oh I don’t know, existing wireless router?
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BUT COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT!!!
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They look remarkably like stealthy, roaming content access points, completely outside the control of the “content owners”. So much for enforcing anti-piracy legislation…
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Your right to free speech ends when you start to infringe on the rights of others. It’s basic.
Your right to free speech doesn’t including infringing on the rights of others.
How hard is that to understand?
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But what about when valuable communications resources are curtailed simply because they also have the capacity to infringe copyright? What about when COICA will block the resolution of full domain names rather than individual sub-domains or specific content? What about when internet censorship lobbied for by industry is also used by government to block legitimate political speech?
Can I put my lunch in it?
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Sure, and your right to copyright enforcement ends at the edge of my privacy.
How hard is that to understand?
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Funnily enough, the “Pirate” box seems to have been created in response to the industry’s anti-piracy efforts, while the “Freedom” box was created as a response to oppressive regimes’ persecution of innocent people.
Your immature “BUT COPYRIGHT!!!11” arguments aside, you MUST be able to see that there’s a parallel between the two devices, even though they were created with different motivations.
I agree with Mike, in the short term the pirate party has a fun ring to it – however I’d also be concerned about the long term name recognition … have you seen the news recently about the real pirates off Somalia? While obviously completely unaffiliated … the connotation remains. Real Pirates are not people fighting for freedom or standing up for their rights – they are thieves and cold blooded murderers. It sounds more like a movie gimmick than a serious political party.
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“BUT COPYRIGHT!!!11″ arguments aside, you MUST be able to see that there’s a parallel between the two devices, even though they were created with different motivations.”
I think the point of the article, if you read between the lines, is that the motivations are exactly the same. It’s just most people call one kind of oppression “dictatorship” and another kind of oppression “copyright enforcement”.
Either way, they’re fighting oppression….
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You mean like hard drives, routers and flash storage?
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The problem is this: copyright is not an inalienable right. Free speech is. Where the two conflict, free speech must win out.
If you’re not an American, your confusion is understandable. If you are, then your confusion is unforgivable.
Your right to enforce copyright stops at due process. You cannot simply ban this technology because of the remote possibility that it will be used for copyright infringement.
Next we’ll be shutting down all search engines because they might be used to search for links to sites that might be used for copyright infringement
Wait – so this little lunch box has:
1) A skull and cross bones on its cover
2) A red LED, possibly blinking
3) Is full of wires and electronics
4) Has protruding antenna
$10 says the 1st person to carry this through an airport gets a free body cavity exam…
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You joke, but there are days I fear we are heading down this exact path.
They should all call themselves the Pirate Party
At least real pirates put themselves in harm’s way when stealing from people and killing, unlike politicians who can steal and kill by ordering other people to do it for them.
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Your right to free speech ends when you start to infringe on the rights of others. It’s basic.
Your right to free speech doesn’t including infringing on the rights of others.
How hard is that to understand?
You’ve got that backwards.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
My right to free speech is protected in the First Amendment to the Constitution. Current copyright law is a law passed by Congress.
The Constitution trumps a law passed by Congress. IANAL, but I don’t think we’ve had any recent Supreme Court cases where free speech over copyright have been the overriding factors, have we?
Your copyright ends when it is in opposition to my rights of free speech.
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Your right to free speech ends when you start to infringe on the rights of others. It’s basic.
Your right to free speech doesn’t including infringing on the rights of others.
Er, sorry, what does that have to do with wireless server hardware?
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Mike, you may wish it to be that way, but it is only true if copyright specifically violates the 1st amendment. For all the huffing and puffing, nobody has been able to successfully make that argument in front of a court in the 200+ years of copyright.
You have the right to your own speech, you do not have any inalienable right to the speech of others. If you an American and are confused, that is understandable. The 1st Amendment stuff is usually taught without the asterix that explain these things.
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Don’t you see the skull and crossbones?
That makes it a box dedicated to infringement – and clubbing baby seals – and child pornography!
Are you all for clubbing baby seals with books full of pornographic pictures of children?
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yeah, except that one is intended to (and more of less fails) to fight actual oppression, while the pirate box fights the artificial oppression boogie-man created by people who just want stuff for free.
Mike trying to put them together is trying to make you think pirate = freedom, when pirate = illegal and freedom = desirable
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Some bet.
Everyone gets one of those now – unless you are a senator.
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Mike didn’t put them together, The Future of Music coalition did.
The point made is that both boxes do effectively the same thing. When dictators and media conglomerates can be thwarted with, and would like to outlaw, the same tool, it says a lot about media conglomerates, doesn’t it?
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I’m just curious. How do you explain the fact that the Copyright Act and the First Amendment have coexisted for about 220 years?
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“You cannot simply ban this technology because of the remote possibility that it will be used for copyright infringement.”
….Limewire…
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Quick, how many revisions has each undergone in that time??
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Agreed with Joe.
Ultimately there is little difference between a dictator and an IP holder. Both of them are with-holding freedom in one form or another.
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Yes. shame on people having a basic expectation of privacy in their communications with other people. Obviously they are copyright violators and probably terrorists. And downright not nice people all around. I say we burn them. The government knows best, right?
Right!?
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$10 says the 1st person to carry this through an airport gets a free body cavity exam…
i flew home from defcon 16 with my badge: http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&biw=1280&bih=831&gbv=2&tbs=isch%3A1&sa=1&q=defcon+16+badge&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=
plus my neighborcon badge (which looks like a box cutter):
http://www.radiantmachines.com/2009/07/neighborcon-2-badge/
and defcon 17:
http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&biw=1280&bih=831&gbv=2&tbs=isch%3A1&sa=1&q=defcon+17+badge&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=
and defcon 18:
http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&biw=1280&bih=831&gbv=2&tbs=isch%3A1&sa=1&q=defcon+18+badge&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=
and so far nothing.
i also routinely fly with a power squid and a 20′ extension cord and haven’t had an issue yet.
funny story, my last trip to defcon my wife forgot a small multi-tool in her carry on which was confiscated, while i, dressed all in black with my phreaknic “i watch you” t-shirt (http://www.cafepress.com.au/toddlyles/663254) and 20 feet of wire made it through the TSA just fine.
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Can you explain the fact that the belief of Geocentrism + Scientific proof of Heliocentrism have coexisted for hundreds of years?
Perhaps it made sense in the past.
Perhaps we did not have enough data to make correct decisions back then, and Geocentrism seemed plausible enough to become the standard.
But, Perhaps, at some point, overwhelming proof on the contrary, forced changes to happen. And, perhaps, just like copyright, some well entrenched “believers” denied Heliocentrism and prosecuted those that believed in it, blocking scientific progress for centuries.
Perhaps it is time to look back and learn from past mistakes?
the war on freedom
“It seems that there are times when ‘piracy’ looks an awful lot like ‘freedom.'”
Which is precisely why our government can shape draconian copyright laws to fight freedom. Deep packet inspection, huge penalties for “infringement” that is likely fair use, and an MPAA run by a former legislator. Do the math: free speech is dying here, and fast.
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I know I know…
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Either way, they’re fighting oppression….
it’s more like this:
piracy is a foregone conclusion. eventually hollywood will realize this and give up, but in the mean time, people have to be vigilant so that bad laws that threaten privacy and free speech don’t get passed in the mean time.
cory doctorow says it a lot better here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/apr/16/digital-economy-act-cory-doctorow
and if hollywood somehow manages to succeed and turn the internet into a dictatorship, boxes like these are the exit strategy.
I hadn’t heard of the pirate box, but when I read about the freedom box yesterday, I wondered precisely how long it would take for it to be used for piracy (and porn, child porn, and for terrorists to communicate, etc). And therefore how long it would take for politicians to call for it to be forbidden or at least regulated. How long until some Sarkozy comes along saying “freedom box can’t be a wild west anymore”.
Freedom and “bad uses” go hand in hand. If we want to be free from censorship we must accept some people will use that freedom for purposes we might not approve of. That’s the point of freedom of speech (and communication). I think the US’s founding fathers saw that perfectly clear. Once the tools of censorship are in place, once it is accepted for some speech to be censored, those tools can be subverted for all kinds of different purposes – from protecting a corrupt government from dissension, to protecting economic interests (from things like copying and sharing content).
We must decide what’s more important: protecting freedom or protecting certain jobs and business models.
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For most of those 200 years it was not necessary to use the 1st amendment in this way because the system was working. By changing the system we made these issues that were non-existent.
They should all call themselves the Pirate Party
“You have killed 3.17 people in your lifetime, Mr. Lipvig.”
Pump 19, Going Postal.
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The musicians you’ve been ripping off are now dictators. Gotcha pal.
You guys find new ways to jump the shark every day.
Though there is some solace knowing that back when he began this blog, this was not where Masnick thought piracy would end up.
Not from where Egypt, Tunisia, and soon Libya are looking at it. I have no doubt this so-called ‘Jasmine Revolution’ will spread to the west by the end of the year.
Technology is awesome. Need drives innovation, but so does “want.”
Of course, ultimate freedom would mean no laws. But that isn’t desirable in a civilized society.
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I’ll give you 50 to 1 odds against. There will be no western revolution, the powers that be are fare too good at staying in control.
The ‘Tea Party’ was almost a real movement–and then it was quietly and efficiently co-opted, and now it’s just another bullshit political party. In other words, it was neutered long before it had the chance to breed.
There will be no revolution in America until total spontaneous violent civil uprising breaks out–and I’d lay odds on that being 30 to 150 years away.
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I once ripped off a musician so badly that they were forced to get a real job!
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Copyright is WAY different now than it was at its inception. Almost unrecognizably different. We are talking about a shift from voluntary copyrights lasting only a couple of decades to automatic, unrelinquishable copyrights spanning nearly a century.
It's all in the name.
So wouldn’t “Digital Freedom Party” be more neutral?
It's all in the name.
Perhaps they’re not trying to be neutral…
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And like most dictators, will eventually find that a fair approach will yield much better results than a heavy-handed one. I have a huge library of music from independent artists who actually enjoy performing and for whom making a livable wage is perfectly fine. We don’t need corporate music and the music cartels are terrified of that thought.
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How is this outside of the realm of copyright enforcement? Anyone can connect to it and monitor what you are using it for.
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“Both of the boxes look remarkably like “contributory copyright violations” in the making.”
By that logic, shouldn’t the RIAA be attacking The Fraunhofer Institut in Germany, since that is who holds the patent on the MP3. Or maybe CERN should be sued for creating the www. Or maybe the IP Nazis should wake up and realize the digital age happened while they were counting their pennies.
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If making music wasn’t a real job, you wouldn’t find music worthy enough to rip off.
I’m sure you imagine software developers, games programmers, authors, movie grips, etc. are all “not real jobs either.”
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I don’t know about you, but I prefer a Louisville Slugger. Using any kind of book to club baby seals just downright seems impractical.
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FYI, I made the Louisville slugger comment. I forgot I wasn’t logged in.
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A baseball bat always seems to ruin the pelt for me. A book seem to do less damage – allowing me to make and sell more baby seal gloves to WikiLeaks supporters.
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All of which I ripped off so badly that they were all forced to get real jobs!
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You sure can! You can even take a…byte…whenever you like.
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You only need to start referring to the IP holders as Nazis and their leaders as Hitler to reach the max. Or would a more modern thing be calling them bin ladin?
If you look behind you, you can see the shark you jumped.
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The standard answer is yell “FIRE” in a crowded theater.
You have the right under the 1st amendment to do so. However, there are laws that apply that will get you locked up, especially if someone gets injured.
Free speech isn’t an absolute, it isn’t a trump card over everything, no matter how much you would like it to be.
Plus, honestly, can you explain how all these laws exist in the face of the 1st amendment? It would appear that any law that restricts your actions, speech, or activities in any way would be a first amendment violation.
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You have the right under the 1st amendment to do so. However, there are laws that apply that will get you locked up, especially if someone gets injured.
UNLESS OF COURSE THERE’S AN ACTUAL FIRE!!!
Then you should yell rape.
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BUT DUE PROCESS!!!!
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There will be no western revolution, the powers that be are far too good at staying in control.
Part of that is that fact that our government grows by inches here and there (boiling a frog, etc), unlike smash-and-grab dictators in other countries.
The US government is like mold; it’s disgusting, it’s all-consuming, and it inexorably spreads outwards . . . just very, very slowly.
Pop Music Dreck
> If making music wasn’t a real job, you
> wouldn’t find music worthy enough to rip off.
That’s so funny you should take it on the road and become a stand up comedian.
Media Moguls like to distort the law.
> You have the right to your own
> speech, you do not have any
> inalienable right to the speech
> of others.
Sure I do. It’s called the public domain.
I also have the right to talk about things that still might be under copyright and to make reasonable references to them.
Media Moguls like to distort the law.
We now have individuals being sued by corporations for large sums comparable to several large single family dwellings. They are being sued over works that would be in the public domain if the 200 year old vision of copyright was still in place.
I don’t think you would get Payne to buy into that.
The twisted logic.
…all information is corporate property and you can’t be allowed to steal corporate property.
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The standard answer is yell “FIRE” in a crowded theater.
That example is endangering someone’s life.
Life is one of those inalienable rights. In that case, life trumps speech.
Just because speech is not an absolute does not mean that copyright is one of the exceptions to it.
As other commenters have noted, copyright was originally much shorter. 14 years if the work was registered (with a possible 2nd 14 year term if the author was still alive). Comparing that to automatic life+70 years is absurd.
Media Moguls like to distort the law.
Yes.
Let’s conflate halting or rolling back of the constant distortion of our laws in favor of corporations to the detriment of individuals as some sort of “Mad Max” nightmare scenario.
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Guilty until proven innocent. It’s just an easier system, especially for the government, which doesn’t have a lot of money to spend on finding out the truth about things.
As a side note, FreedomBox has been funded via Kickstarter. It took 5 days to raise $60,000, with over half raised in only 2, and this is with a 30 day period to allow for funding.
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/721744279/push-the-freedombox-foundation-from-0-to-60-in-30
I guess people care about freedom a lot, even if some may decry it as piracy…
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David Icke & Alex Jones and other alarmist termed this ages ago. Its called the Trickle Effect; the fact is turning on the faucet will bring out the bucket brigade.
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The shark was jumped when file sharing was labelled theft and subsequently file sharers are now all thieves who never support artists and want everything for free.
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Havn’t said this here in a long time.
Thanks for the link!
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When you wake up and realize that the choice to put someone online is that of the rights owner, not some punk in Mom’s basement or in a dorm room, you might be able to understand why you have a shark swimming behind you trying to learn your jumping technique.
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Actually, the foregone conclusion is that there will be more action taken to enforce copyright and maintain the rights of legitimate content owners. Piracy is only “a foregone conclusion” at the current levels if you assume nothing will be done.
My thoughts are that 2009 was probably peak piracy, and it’s all downhill from there. There are fewer and fewer countries that will tolerate it, and they may end up finding themselves on the outside looking in, with no legal sources for material. Like it or not, countries like Spain could end up with most file sharing sites shut down because the content they will list won’t be legally available in the country, which will no longer make it a simple copyright violation case.
Change is coming. I don’t think many people on Techdirt are really ready for it.
Re: Re:
More enforcement may lead to the demise of some file-sharing technologies, but it’ll do absolutely nothing about people being pissed off with the copyright system. Quite the contrary, in fact.
More copyright enforcement will inevitably break the camel’s back, and that’s where radical change will come from.
Pathetic IP lawyers like yourself will be out of a job. Bide your time.
Media Moguls like to distort the law.
… and we would still be on horse and buggy if we stuck with the 200 year old vision of transportation.
Guess what? Progress happens.
who hired you people
those idiots that come to this website to comment and speak on behalf of the big nice non-crooks corporations are getting paid for it.
My question is who hired you, and how can i get this job? I want to comment against normal people for those corp giants and I want to get paid for it.
Media Moguls like to distort the law.
Guess what? Progress happens.
That’s what everyone keeps trying to explain to you, but you seem to prefer to manufacture ways to impede its progress. To recap, it will happen either way. The question is how long will you continue to fight it rather than use it to your advantage?
Media Moguls like to distort the law.
How is perverting the public domain progress?
Don’t be foolish. Sweden already learnt they were powerless to stop copyright infringement. In fact their pitiful attempts to curb it by monitoring IP addresses meant most of Swedish traffic switched to using VPNs to hide their details and reported piracy rates actually INCREASED.
Gov’t will always be technologically behind because it is constantly stuck in a backwaards mindset. MI5 opposed the DEAct in the UK, because they anticipated the increase in encrypted traffic would make it far harder to distinguish ‘petty criminals’ from terrorists and other MI5 targets and more work would have to be done to crack more encrypted lines of communication.
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Maybe when you learn that in reality we do not live in a perfect middle mans world where putting something out in public is not the same as giving the public any kind of right or ability to use something even when you’ve sold it to them.
Maybe that’ll be the same day you learn that we do not have choice or control over every aspect of what we do, particularly anything put out publicly, and that playing along with someones delusion that DRM and 95 year copyrights are necessary is something that’ll always be detrimental to society.
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I’m sure you imagine software developers, games programmers, authors, movie grips, etc. are all “not real jobs either.”
Actually, software development is my hobby. My “real” job is much more mundane.
Media Moguls like to distort the law.
Guess what? Progress happens.
Amazing. Just… amazing! Physician heal thyself…
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Slavery was allowed for a very long time before we as a country finally saw the error of our ways. Women’s suffrage is similar.
If “it’s always been that way” is your only defense for keeping a law on the books, you’re in trouble.
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When you wake up and realize that if some punk on his mom’s basement or in a dorm room can destroy your business model *and do it for free*, then you might understand that, not only is your business model completely outdated, but you’ve already lost.
Same Tactics
The reason they seem so similar is because Monopoly Rightsholders and Despots resort to the same tactics to silence people!
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Not to mention the telecoms will NOT like this one bit. So you’ll be up against copyright, ISPs, and federal investigators (eg. child porn, hacking, terrorism).
I don’t think these devices will go far.
ISPs wont be against it, especially in the latter case. After all, someone has to carry all that data.
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+5 insightful
I’ve said that something like this will become the future a while back (some sort of widespread peer to peer wireless net). Looks like it’s becoming a reality. This, perhaps along with something like bitcoin, could also combine to produce a tax free, government unregulatable currency.
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(and all the critics will still argue that some sort of wireless peer to peer net is impossible for blah blah blah reasons. No, it’s absolutely possible. Much of what restricts it is the fact that the government wrongfully grants monopoly bandwidth use on all the good, long distance, wall penetrating spectra to big corporations).
prirate +guns
re: the wireless server.
guns don’t kill people; it’s the owners.
free speech is NOT IP violation.
clear on this now?
oh, and pot does NOT create heroin addicts.
packrat
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You said:
Your right to free speech ends when you start to infringe on the rights of others. It’s basic.
Your right to free speech doesn’t including infringing on the rights of others.
How hard is that to understand?
Then:
Mike, you may wish it to be that way, but it is only true if copyright specifically violates the 1st amendment.
So you admit, in a convoluted way, that you were wrong, and that free speech outweighs copyright. Then you attempt to derail the entire argument by asserting that copyright doesn’t violate free speech.
I hope you see why you recieve such a poor reception on this site. Such poorly thought out arguments will not sway any but the most emotional ninnys.
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My thoughts are that 2009 was probably peak piracy, and it’s all downhill from there.
Oh, piracy has decreased since then, has it?
http://anonnews.org/?p=press&a=item&i=554
http://anonnews.org/?p=press&a=item&i=554
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That’s right, as a games developer of 25+ years, my dad still reckons I should get a ‘proper job’ somewhere.
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the foregone conclusion is that there will be more action taken to enforce copyright and maintain the rights of legitimate content owners. Piracy is only “a foregone conclusion” at the current levels if you assume nothing will be done.
it’s not based in the idea that nothing will be done. piracy is a foregone conclusion regardless of what is done.
hollywood can capitulate to piracy in order to cut its losses, or it can go full-orwell and bring everyone who is concerned about basic freedoms into the fight. either way, piracy wins.
except that the war on piracy is a war of attrition.
hollywood’s weapons are all based on money: lawyers, lobbying, lawsuits, digital right management technology, coin-operated legislation, even law enforcement. it all costs money, which is finite.
piracy’s weapons are all based on time and talent: reverse engineering, freely distributed tools, collaboration, encryption, etc. they’re all the products of talented people and invested time, which are both infinite.
hollywood has fallen victim to one of the classic blunders – the most famous of which is “never get involved in a land war in asia” – but only slightly less well-known is this: never expend finite resources to fight someone whose resources are infinite.
My thoughts are that 2009 was probably peak piracy, and it’s all downhill from there.
and my thoughts are that pirates are just getting started. groups like the Free Software Foundation didn’t care about piracy when piracy was just about getting free music.
the more this sort of thing starts to resemble a battle for basic freedom, the more time and talent becomes available for the fight.
There are fewer and fewer countries that will tolerate it, and they may end up finding themselves on the outside looking in, with no legal sources for material. Like it or not, countries like Spain could end up with most file sharing sites shut down because the content they will list won’t be legally available in the country, which will no longer make it a simple copyright violation case.
i hope that does happen. one of two things will result:
1) spain becomes the “haven for piracy” that hollywood would have us believe that china (and canada lol) is. how do you combat piracy then? invade spain?
2) spain becomes the new bollywood and a wealth of new, non-hollywood material hits the net, legal or otherwise. what do you do then? compete with spain?
either way, hollywood overplays its hand and only hurts itself.
To outlaw this tech would be to make every one of you fools turn over your wireless routers, 5 volt batteries, and lunch boxes. do you even look to see what this shits made of?