Copyrights and P2P
An essaic commentary to the discussion at http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20081119/0334182883.shtml
by Max Gigawatt, 27 August 2010

In my not so humble opinion, Davenport Lyons (DL) has engaged in privately operating that which only police agencies are permitted to do… an ENTRAPMENT scheme. Thus they (DL) are *clearly* engaging in a massive CRIMINAL ACTIVITY of tremendous seriousness, or have done so. They have, in effect, set themselves up as THE POLICE, and have implicitly IMPERSONATED THE POLICE for PURPOSES of EXTORTION.

Furthermore, they have been part of a CRIMINAL CONSPIRACY with DigiProtect AND the original copyright holders, who all are thus also guilty of conspiring to IMPERSONATE THE POLICE for PURPOSES of EXTORTION.

Don’t anyone pay them, ever! It would be like paying a ransom to kidnappers… it only encourages them to break the Law more and more.
The no-good, lying bastards would not DARE to bring a case to Court, for they would immediately be unmasked and revealed as the cowardly, conniving Criminals that they are!

Furthermore, the entire Copyright Debate is a Red Herring! When you download or upload “a photograph”, “a movie” or “a song”, etc., you are NOT transferring the ORIGINAL WORK… only a (usually highly degraded) COPY, which, being digital, suffers from all manner of “sampling and conversion errors” and DOES NOT DUPLICATE THE ORIGINAL WORK, which Original Work was (mostly if not entirely) a product of mechanisms which are INHERENTLY ANALOG, such as lenses, chemical processes, paint brushes, guitars, the human voice, etc., etc.; in short: The Real Thing. It is as though (the heirs, agents and assigns of) Leonardo da Vinci were to claim that photographic reproductions of “the Mona Lisa” ARE “the Mona Lisa”, and that your possession, duplicating and exchange of such copy or copies is DEPRIVING THEM OF THE ORIGINAL! Clearly such an argument by them is best described in polite company as “a vast load of bovine excrement!”
If one goes back to the original intent and purpose of Copyrights, it will be seen that they were a ‘Special Dispensation’ and ‘for the Public Good’ and were made for TWO REASONS ONLY:
1. To facilitate and promote the WIDESPREAD DISTRIBUTION of the author’s ‘brainchild’: his most carefully chosen thoughts as crafted into words, the Printed Word in that case; and only secondarily…
2. To help Publishers recover the Capital Investments in their Printing Presses, because without printing presses, no such Public Benefit via Widespread Distribution would have been possible at that time.

That this ‘Special Dispensation, for the Public Good’ allowed the publishers to make a Profit is at most a minor part of the original situation, and strictly speaking, is only relevant to the extent that such profits, ASSUMED AS being fairly shared with Authors, would *tend to* encourage authors to be more prolific in producing one brainchild after another… but that is about Quantity, not Quality, and is thus not a matter of Public Good. Even the ancients had an appreciation for someone filtering out the “garbage” for them, and they were *far* less busy than we are. In antiquity (when books were copied by hand, a months-long process), the Authors were mostly never paid a red cent. Some may have had a benefactor who paid them a stipend for the duration of writing, or a one-time commission, but there was never any notion of any kind of per-copy remuneration… Perish the thought!

That the Printer’s Copyright laws were later expanded and generalized to include other forms of media (and the reproduction and distribution of such media) should not be interpreted as erasing the Original Purpose and Intent of Copyrights. To the contrary, those later extensions should be viewed as steps which seemed necessary and expedient at the time, but which were based on the same old technology-at-the-time kind of considerations. Those considerations no longer apply; the march of technology has brought us to the point where every man, woman and child is now easily capable of publishing any “brainchild” of their choosing to the entire world, almost instantly, and at close to zero cost.

You should see now that P2P file exchange is the modern equivalent of the Movable Type (Gutenberg) Printing Press… it maximizes the WIDESPREAD DISTRIBUTION of the Artists’ brainchild or “Content”, whether that be still images, audio, video, 3D or whatever may come next. That it cuts the MIDDLEMEN out of the equation is neither here nor there; the only reason they were ever granted Special Dispensation is because of the particular (rare and expensive) state of duplicating technology AT THE TIME, hundreds of years ago.
Nowadays, the Public Good seems to have been largely and ‘conveniently’ forgotten in favor of Endless Unearned Profits, while the Widespread Distribution of an Artist’s brainchild is generally only hampered and impeded by those old Copyright Laws, acting as they do to “fill the vacuum” in which the just and proper Artists’ Compensation Scheme should have evolved. Unfortunately, those old Laws did not come bearing an Expiration Date or Sunset Clause… but they should have!

Finally, the media industry groups which make these absurd claims of “copyright infringement” know perfectly well that THEY are the TRUE PIRATES, in that they attempt use their shyster shenanigans to rob everyone else, the Artists and the Consumers alike, while maximizing benefit to themselves! Thus, with them actually CREATING NOTHING, and having no regard for the Public Good, they have shot themselves in their collective feet, and as a result they have NO LEG TO STAND ON. They have made themselves into useless antisocial pariahs, whining about how they are not getting “their fair share” (read: the lion’s share) of what they consider to be their ENTITLEMENT. What they are entitled to is EXACTLY NOTHING.

— Max