[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by stonetools

Well, can you give them something more than 8 years? It took 40 years to bring order to the Wild West and even longer to supress Atlantic piracy, didn't it? Eventually, the rule of law came to both areas.

If the the efforts of law enforcement were working, we'd see less illegal activity online as the web grows. More actual numbers, perhaps, but a smaller percentage of online activity would be illegal. Instead, the opposite is happening: new methods of committing fraud, copyright infringement, virus-spreading, and harassment are far outstripping attempts to stop them.

Outside the MR bubble, they arguably DO have widespread public support.

And that's why suspected pirate sites are languishing in tiny, near-forgotten corners of the internet, right? Because there's no widespread public support for unauthorized filesharing.

You have a problem with the law? Then do the right thing and petition the democratically elected law makers-don't flout the law.

"Work within the rules" is not the only ethical way to change a corrupt and oppressive legal system. When the power-structure's too entrenched, the only change comes from ignoring the law--and finding out how many other people are willing to ignore it, too.

(Shrug) Laws-including IP and obscenity laws- vary from place to place. Does that mean that we can't enforce IP law anywhere?

It means that we have no agreement on what "enforce IP law" means. In some countries, downloading is legal. In some, content that's under copyright in others, is freely available.

When Amazon sold copies of 1984 without the rights to do so, they weren't prosecuted for their crime. They were sued for removing them from people's Kindles--but apparently, they weren't worth going after by the rightsholders.

Where's the prosecution for the plagiarism--and copyright infringement for commercial purposes--of Ruth Ann Nordin's books?

If the point of the law was "prosecute known crimes, easy to prove, in order to show people this is wrong and discourage it in the future," those should've been high on the list to go after. Ignoring cases like that, leaves the public thinking "copyright law is to support the income of the rich, not for the good of the public."

I think ALL Internet related crime should be prosecuted-including copyright infringement- even if that particular offence is excused by some. How's that?

Fine--but it doesn't help to figure out how to do that. You seem to think file-uploading and torrents are somehow isolated from other illegal activities online; that legal teams can effectively fight file-sharing without fighting spambots, viruses and phishing. I don't--and I think that efforts against those three will cut down on file-sharing much more than efforts against file-sharing alone.

Efforts against file-sharing alone are tackling the symptoms. They go after one host site or another, without considering how the very structure of the internet allows these actions. They want to make this *one* use of that structure illegal, without any understanding that there's no way to phrase that restriction.

They want to spend a lot of money going after "digital pirates," whom they claim are causing a great deal of damage that's invisible to everyone except specialists in copyright math, while refusing to go after those who file false DMCA takedowns against political opponents, those who send those endless V1AGR4 ads that clog up servers, those who spew hatespeech that wouldn't be allowed in public in any city in the US.

And that's aside from "they want to spend money stoping 'copyright infringement' instead of creating new jobs," which is a lot more relevant to most people online.

Attempts to "bring law to the internet" are doomed as long as the people pushing for "law" are ignoring what everyone else thinks the real problems are.