[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by haydnfan

I think that we are close to the end of rampant piracy. When governments crack down and seize assets of big torrent aggregator sites like megaupload, they only have to repeat that a few times to make these sites afraid to operate.

MegaUpload was not a "torrent aggregator." It was a file-hosting service; there are dozens, maybe hundreds of others. It's not very different from a cloud service like Dropbox and Amazon Cloud.

Shutting down one or several of those isn't going to matter, because there's a great need for the service for all types of business & education purposes. Without requiring inspection of every data pack moved through the system, there's no way to establish how much content is legit.

Torrent aggregators are even harder to shut down; the legal case against them is on thinner legal ground, since they're not hosting files at all. They're just a specialized search engine.

For piracy to be rampant no matter the technology (p2p, torrents etc) you need easy to find websites. Eliminate the websites and you will still have piracy but it won't be nearly as widespread.

Ask publishers and music/movie reps if it's okay if only elite geeks know where the filesharing sites are. They've been screaming about Teh Eebils Ov Piracy since all that existed was text-only ebooks and software that would fit on a floppy disc exchanged on warez newsgroups.

Knowing that their level of hysteria has never had anything to do with the actual amount of damage being done to their industries, I don't believe they'll be satisfied to allow that a certain amount of filesharing is worth tolerating in the name of freedom and privacy. (A certain amount of outright theft is worth tolerating in the name of freedom and privacy--we don't require strip-searches of people leaving shops, even though we know that some percentage of those people have stolen something. Enforcement would cause more damage than allowing a certain level of loss, and accepting that doesn't mean condoning the crimes.)

And it is a good thing and worth the expense. It's not just greedy corporations hurt by this.

Musicians, authors, everyone involved in making movies and tv shows, everyone involved in creating games, software engineers are all hurt by piracy.

I, a teacher, am even hurt by piracy. No matter what textbook you choose, the solution manuals are one google search way.

Solution: stop using a book to come up with the problems, and the solutions won't be googleable. (I am aware that's a hideously time-consuming response, and teachers aren't paid enough nor given enough time to do this remotely well. But that's a problem of the education industry, not copyright enforcement.)

It's impossible to assign homework where half of my class doesn't just look up the solutions and not try.

No it's not--if the homework doesn't come out of a published source, they can't look up the answers. The "not-try" crowd will be identifiable. Even better, give them one or two questions from a published source, and the rest make up to look similar at first glance, but be different, so they'll grab the answers they think are right, and will fail on the others.

The same generation that doesn't perceive copying as wrong, has also no problem downloading music, movies, and games without paying.

They also have no problem watching movies on television, listening to a radio station that gives them free music 24/7, playing games on countless websites that offer free games... the concept of "this free stuff is okay, that free stuff is not okay" isn't knowledge people are born with. Recognizing the difference between feedbooks and [redacted]; the vaguaries of copyright law are an *obscure* type of knowledge.

They don't feel the least bit guilty about what they do. Educating that generation is also important. They have no respect for intellectual property.

The general public has *never* had any "respect for intellectual property." Sixty years ago, violating IP law was almost impossible for a single individual who didn't own a company. It took either expensive, specialized machinery or incredible social resources. The closest you could get was performing a town play without licensing the content.

The photocopier changed that. The computer changed it more. And the media industries--including books--have been fighting ever since to re-create the scarcity that protected their business model.

In summary, piracy hurts many people and two steps need to be taken: keep cracking down on big torrent sites and educate the young adults out there.

It starts with educating the would-be crackdown team about the technology involved. Torrent sites are *drastically* different from file-storage sites. Torrents don't stop if you remove the site.

And "educating the young" without lying to them would involve explaining very complex legalities that top lawyers in the industry don't agree on.