[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by stonetools

The "technologists" believe that you should be able to do anything you want on your computing devices and on the Internet. Anything that interferes with that freedom (anti-piracy legislation, DRM, proprietary formats) are all to be reviled and resisted.

No, anything that interferes with that freedom is antithetical to the nature of the internet, and will not work except as patchwork solutions for limited-scope problems.

Censorship=damage=rerouting time. The internet was built that way--not specifically to fight censorship, but to route around dropped carriers, bad code loops, and overloaded servers. "Data didn't get through; try another method" is what made digital business possible; one cannot simultaneously support that approach and try to block it.

Its is therefore inevitable that the Internet will be brought under the rule of law-the public will demand it and government will respond to public pressure.

Might as well mandate that pi be equal to three, or that cars get 75 miles to the gallon of gas. Or, sticking to more social realms, that all children get high test scores in school. The only way to achieve these results is to either rewrite reality, or change the standards by which success is measured.

Everything the writer objects to are attempts by business and/or the government to bring the rule of law to the Internet. Unfortunately for the author, such attempts will continue , because the Internet is just too important to be left to the technologists.

As long as "the technologists" are writing the code, they'll be the ones shaping the future of the internet. We have politicians who don't know the difference between a document and the program that opens it, trying to mandate how people can use both. We have even more politicians who think that computers have "photos" and "movies" and "songs" and "ebooks" and "emails," rather than really long collections of ones and zeros which are being processed through various filter programs to display them so human perceptions can make sense of them.

Once the Atlantic sea routes became central to international commerce, the world's navies hunted down the pirates and established the rule of law across the Atlantic. I expect the same will happen as the Internet becomes more and more important to world commerce.

When did we eliminate piracy in the Atlantic?

But real-world comparisons with physical piracy are lacking an essential detail: Real-world pirates are directly interfering with commercial activity, and therefore have reason to stay near the most profitable routes. Internet "pirates" have no interest in participating directly with commercial media activity, and have no reason to spend time in populated areas.

Instead, the "pirates" spend time in obscure niches of the internet... until the public finds them and demands they hand over their loot--an interesting inverse from real-world piracy. Internet "pirates" who hoard are never found; it's only the ones who share openly who are at risk. This is why digital piracy will never go away. Shutting down Megaupload and various torrent sites only cuts down on the leeches.