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.
> 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.
Why do people confuse the concept of free speech with some specific political or legal idea?
There are many other ways in which a reduction of free speech is extremely harmful. Look at the great firewall of China blocking democratic content, look at reviews being censored by websites or posters afraid of lawsuits.
Free speech is important and extends far outside of politics.
So please, tell me, is this number illegal to possess or distribute? What sort of disturbing thought or speech crime is that?
1272705567343948816021070860118743823207760906496
I don't think I want to live anywhere where it's illegal to possess or distribute a number.
And we don't want to live with people who can engage in the intellectual dishonesty that a site dedicated and known for primarily listing numbers pointing to copies of somebody else's work, that they worked hard to create, is harmless.
Yes, there are rich people who make money off of TV shows, movies, videogames, etc. But there are also regular hardworking people who depend on it for their living, and saying TPB is just exercising free speech really skips over the issue.
> Yes, there are rich people who make money off of TV shows, movies, videogames, etc. But there are also regular hardworking people who depend on it for their living, and saying TPB is just exercising free speech really skips over the issue.
Does it though? TPB themselves are not doing any sort of piracy, nor are they harming anyone. That exercise is left entirely up to the users.
The only thing they do is distribute numbers, exactly like I just did. Your choice what you do with that. If you choose to use that number to harm someone, that's up to you, not me. I'm not at fault for giving you a number.
Perhaps those users look at it from another perspective: maybe people shouldn't be making money like that. We live in a post-scarcity world with digital resources, we have no need for such people anymore. We've shown time and time again that even without enforcement, some will thrive and profit greatly, some will operate for free, and others will fall. Maybe it's time to just let it happen and give up on the use of coercive force to create a false market.
I can't say whether it's right or wrong, I don't think there's a correct answer there, but you have to understand that different people view these issues entirely differently.
The world isn't theoretical. Context matters, intent matters. It's called the PIRATE bay for fucks sake. Sure, there is plenty of regular sharing on TPB. But the majority of it is pirated content that they are making a hell of a lot easier for people to access.
This thread is really exposing to me the variety of views on the topic. I get your argument, but it's like you're deliberately ignoring the reality of how TPB is used.
Which people are you talking about that we have no need for? The people who make the content? You don't feel we have a need for them? I love cutting out middle men as much as anyone, but eventually somebody has to make the product. I've seen people argue that authors shouldn't be paid for their work, they should do it as a side project of passion and be happy to see somebody reading a copy of their work. I'd much rather do my art all day than have to do it as a side project while I work at something else to pay the bills.
And as an aside, we may live in a post-scarcity world but it sure as hell isn't distributed.
> This thread is really exposing to me the variety of views on the topic. I get your argument, but it's like you're deliberately ignoring the reality of how TPB is used.
I'm simply saying TPB cannot be held directly responsible for how their users behave. Same as any website operator really. Not "deliberately ignoring" anything. TPB doesn't pirate. TPB helps pirates by offering names and comments on hashes. I don't see why that should be illegal at all.
Their name and marketing is simply the best marketing for their platform to get the most ad views. Nothing wrong with that.
> Which people are you talking about that we have no need for? The people who make the content? You don't feel we have a need for them? I love cutting out middle men as much as anyone, but eventually somebody has to make the product.
Simply "working hard" alone should not be rewarded. And as we've seen time and time again, plenty of people are willing to make a product for free, with or without ad revenue or to find alternative ways to profit. Just because 1 business model fails doesn't mean everybody loses out. Just some people. I'm saying the people who _rely_ upon the failing business model should in fact lose rather than being encouraged by archaic laws.
Using Chinese censorship to argue about pirated content is, imo, a variation of the slippery slope fallacy.
If someone obtained your family's credit card numbers and PINs, you would consider them to be in their good right to distribute them freely? They're just numbers, after all.
Well said, it's definitely something that needs to be discussed. That however is separate from distributing simple numbers, which do not ever construct a work, in my opinion.
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.
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.
When people have fundamentally different views of what's right, just and moral, and when outcomes of creating things like tpb could land one in prison, what does one do if they want to live in an environment where creating things like tpb wont land them in prison?
Theft is a concept that originates from our definition of "property". I oppose the legal definition that copyright == property; I agree that a reasonably short copyright term can encourage the creation of art, but what we have now is outrageous and I don't think the trade-off makes sense for the public.
>> "I oppose the legal definition that copyright == property"
How about a definition like - "If I create something, I own it and have the right to profit from it." Why should my right to profit from what I create have a limited term? Why should it be ok for someone to copy it just because they have the ability to?
Why should the person who first arrange a series of words in a particular order have the power to prevent other people from arranging words into the same order, in perpetuity?
Copyright prevents the free speech of others. There's some justification for it doing so. But it's not a natural, or absolute, right.
The power to prevent others from copying the arrangement is an incentive to arrange in the first place. But it should be limited. Property rights allow me to restrict your speech when your literally on my government sanctioned land. I don't see much difference when it comes to IP.
Edit: copyright should be more limited than physical property rights, so I'm in agreement. But neither can be absolute when the government only has a piece of paper to abide by that prevents them from being revoked.
There are exceptions to copyright to minimise the impact on free speech (satire, news for example). I guess people's opinions on this will ultimately come down to their views on free speech and that varies throughout the world.
The US Constitution does not recognize ideas as property. Copyrights and patents are limited-time incentives which may be granted by the government to encourage creativity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Clause
Your "right to profit" only exists in so far that you can try to profit from it, but naturally that might fail if someone takes your idea and implements it cheaper.
Copyright is only a government-granted, temporary monopoly on that idea to incentivize you to live from creating them in the first place and to create more.
Once you have given your idea to someone else, where does your natural right come from to control what they do with it?
He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper [candle] at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature.... Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.
The very idea of idea ownership is a dangerous one. Because most ideas are compositions of other ideas; should you pay if you write a poem because someone else invented the concept of poems?
>Why should my right to profit from what I create have a limited term?
This is a much broader question about the rationale behind copyright law and the concept of intellectual property. It is really beyond the scope of the question posed (is copyright violation theft?).
"If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe."
You are not born in isolation from the rest of us. Everything you create originated from an idea that you learned from somebody else. You have no right of ownership over something that is not entirely yours.
So if you make an apple pie, you don't mind that I come and steal it from your windowsill? You don't own it, after all.
What if you spend a year making a beautiful cabinet? You didn't invent the tree, or the saw, so it's okay if I come by and cart the cabinet over to my house, right?
> That's an argument against the entire idea of personal property.
It doesn't seem to be inherently an argument against the entire idea of "personal property", it seems to be inherently an argument against the idea that property (personal, real, or otherwise) is a matter of absolute right, rather than a matter of an exchange in which owners are granted privilege at the expense of restrictions on everyone else's freedom because of a perceived social benefit to that exchange -- where the parameters, then, of the particular privileges of owners become subject to analysis of whether the exchange really does have net social value.
In regards to intellectual property of the types dependent, in US law, on the Constitution's so-called "Copyright Clause", this is pretty explicitly the premise in the US Constitutional system; in addition, the differences in the privileges and limitations of real and personal property rights (and the particular parameters of particular subclasses of each), as well as things like eminent domain, are very hard to conceptualize under a model of property-as-absolute-right unless you simply define each feature as its own axiom of property rights, except the ones you don't like and define them as violations of axiomatic rights, whereas the whole regime of property rights and its evolution makes a lot more sense under a social benefit exchange view with an evolving view of what provisions actually provide social benefit.
Why should you have that right in the first place?
Note that I agree that you should (or, rather, that as a society we should make sure that it's possible under reasonable conditions), but my reason for agreement is not able to justify perpetual copyright.
My reasoning happens to be similar to what the U.S. Constitution says, but I can imagine others having different reasoning for the same idea.
Let's say you wrote a book and writing books is your only means of putting food on the table - and then one day you sit next to someone on the train who is reading a scanned copy of your book on their tablet. You ask them about it, and they say "yeah I don't buy books really, I downloaded this off torrents". Sure, the book they have is not "stolen" per se, but would you personally not feel like someone "stole" at least some of your work from you?
I believe that this is a very interesting entry point to a discussion, because the immediate reply to this is - that library books don't generate any extra income to the author. And that is also true. But I feel like even without calling it theft it is not entirely fair.
> writing books is your only means of putting food on the table
That's a strange assumption. Many authors fail, or only produce works in their spare time and work other jobs. I mean there's no fundamental right to be a successful author who can live off selling books.
Of course as a society we find it desirable to create an environment where artists can make a living from their works and create more art. That's why copyright exists. It's a tradeoff, all citizens are required to respect the creations of others in exchange for the opportunity for everyone to dedicate their lives to it and make an income with it. (Note: It's just an opportunity to make profit, not a right to profit)
But that societal contract gets perverted by commercial interests to the point where people stop seeing copyright as something positive and instead will refuse to adhere to it.
The internet making copying so much easier than ever before also skews that tradeoff by making it much more difficult for everyone to respect copyright. Breaking copyright is even easier than jaywalking and I don't think private citizens will stop anytime soon.
So ultimately that scheme to incentivize people to be creative used to be "fair", but now that view has somewhat shifted. And the system needs an overhaul.
I'd very much expect most authors that focus on literature rather than short-form paid-by-the-word non-fiction-work to fail or only receive a minority of their income from writing.
Becoming a writer to make money off literature is pretty much like playing the lottery - the odds are badly stacked against you; if you have "success" most of the time you'll make a pittance, and only a tiny proportion of the people who are successful make it big.
If anything, current incentive structures created by current copyright are bad for most people in the creative fields, as the "hit culture" means they're heavily geared towards disproportionally rewarding a very small subset of people. While the hope of striking it big may lure some people to create, I'm more concerned that the bad odds of being able to make ends meet puts a lot of very creative people off those career choices.
I think very few people feel that depriving some person of the fruits of his or her labor in the way that you describe is a moral or ethical thing to do. But, it is by definition not theft. Perhaps some new law, or some changes to law are needed to fairly deal with the problem. Treating it as theft is an abuse of the law.
I think it is interesting that you use a hypothetical author as an example since even before technology showed up and wrecked the party, copyright law arguably failed (or at least was never very good) at its supposed purpose.
> would you personally not feel like someone "stole" at least some of your work from you?
Absolutely not. If anything, I would be flattered to meet somebody actually reading my book, and I'd probably be eager to have a chat with him, maybe ask for opinions and perhaps tell him about other books I'm working on, if it looks like he could be interested. That'd be an event that could make me very happy.
The reality is that nobody seems to be interested in what I do. Should I feel I'm being treated unfair by all the people in the train who never bought and never used my stuff? Never even heard of me?
They don't have to buy it, but it doesn't change the fact that they are using your work without paying you. It's the same as if you were a street painter selling your work, and someone comes around and takes a picture of what you painted and says "naaah, I'll just print it at home, rather than giving you $50 for it". You are not entitled to any sales. But that person took your work without paying. You have no right to demand that he pays for it, but he had no right to take it without paying.
Context matters. I can yell FIRE in my own home, but I can't go into a crowded theatre and yell it. The hash as you post it here is meaningless. But elsewhere it could be the key to another's property.
Personally I think you should be free to yell "FIRE" in a theater too. If that started a panic and someone came to harm due to it then you might be held partially responsible to that harm, but so should those people who mindlessly trample on others without assessing the situation.
But if nothing happened then there should be no reason to make your exclamation illegal.
Of course you could still be thrown out of the theater for disrupting the performance, providing further disincentive for doing something like that, but that's separate from the legality of your speech.
And it's perfectly useful. Paste it into any BT client, wind up with a copy of... Windows 7 it looks like. Practically the same as finding the link on TPB.
So, is this another's property or not? Did I just make it by appending a short string to turn it into a URL?
For the wellbeing of civilization over the next century, copyright and freedom of speech will probably affect everyone to a greater degree than war crimes, or even pervasive spying.
Also consider that Sunde has made a number of comments which are critical of TPB and how that project has turned out. So while TPB isn't necessarily the ideal, maybe more of a failed or partially-failed attempt.
It isn't some noble cause because you presumably believe copyright is moral. To those who believe copyright, copyright in its current form, is an immoral restriction on free speech, it may very well be.
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.