[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by stonetools

It's actually pretty difficult to keep setting up pirate websites from inside the Jessup Correctional Facility. I don't think they have guaranteed Broadband Internet there.

Ah. So you think that when the *current* round of pirate site hosts are collected and imprisoned, nobody else will start running pirate sites?

I notice you failed to define "pirate sites." Can you define a category of activities that makes a site subject to criminal investigation, and separates it from, for example, secure business data exchanges or open hosting of creative content?

Is google a pirate site for giving people links to free bootleg downloads hosted elsewhere? If not, why is TPB a pirate site? Is Amazon a pirate site for hosting plagiarized ebooks?

My guess is that prosecuting pirates is going to be an ongoing activity like prosecuting bank robbers, counterfeiters, and money launderers.
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If your point is that you can't move against rights violators until you precisely determine the losses, you are wrong once again.

I don't mean that any particular case can't be tried until exact damages are established; however, to justify substantial expense and other resources on prosecution, we need some measure of the value gained from that prosecution.

Exact losses of counterfeiting aren't known, but the dollar amount is obvious: one counterfeit dollar in circulation is at least one dollar taken away from legitimate business use. The fake dollar is substituted for $1 of goods or services. The additional harm is harder to track, but there's a baseline to work from.

One downloaded PDF of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone is worth... what? The unauthorized book might *not* be substituted for one-Pottermore-purchase; it might be substituted for "reading a borrowed copy" or "reading something else entirely." Or it might be substituted for Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, because the reader wants the UK version that's not sold in the US.

One downloaded copy of the first episode of Game of Thrones is worth... what? There's no legitimate source of videos to purchase; the only way to get access is to subscribe to a monthly service (HBO) and wait for it to be scheduled to play.

One downloaded copy of Chumbley's Qutub is worth... what? The book's out of print and has no legit ebook version; the author is deceased. Collectible copies sell for upwards of $900--but the rights holders get no share of that; their income for the book is done. (They've announced there will be no reprintings.)

How much taxpayer money should be spent trying to stop these downloads?

I might add that there was all sorts of rejoicing around these parts about the DOJ going after the Price Fixing BPHs, although the alleged damages there can't be precisely fixed.

They can be estimated: damage is "the amount extra customers had to pay after the collusion." We have numbers for that. Before collusion: Bestsellers $9.99. After collusion: bestsellers $12.99 - $14.99. We have sales records to say how much they did pay. We don't have exact numbers for how many people gave up on agency-priced books and found something else to read; we can't measure the cultural harms caused by creating a money-based filter for some books. But we do know how much prices went up, and how many people paid more than they would have without the allegedly-illegal collusion.

How much money did Rowling lose from 10 years of bootleg ebooks floating around the internet?

Its only when it comes to the rights of copyright holders that precisely quantifying losses becomes a bar to action.

No, it's a bar for any action--in order to decide to spend resources stopping an activity, we need to know what good that's going to do.

"It will put criminals in jail" is a good thing. However, when they're only criminals because they're presumably causing economic, not physical, damage--someone has to be able to state how much damage they're causing.

That doesn't mean the cost of prosecution needs to be lower than the damages; we prosecute petty thieves and it costs a lot more than a stolen CD. But we can say how much damage the stolen CD was, and that the deterrent value of potential prosecution is worth the expense of the ones that are prosecuted.

We've yet to see that prosecutions for filesharing have any deterrent value--and this isn't just a matter of jurisdiction. The very shape of the law makes it hard to determine who's breaking it. Without defining "piracy" in a way that doesn't include how the majority think of using their media (sharing books with friends, making mix-tapes, hosting movie night in the student center), there's no public support for the prosecutions.

Well, we could do all sorts of stupidity. I'll settle for extending the rule of law so that those setting up piracy sites in foreign safe harbors can be brought to justice.

How americentric of you. Why not allow those countries to set the world standard for copyright infringement, and require US businesses to go along with them?

Why should other countries be forced to adopt US laws?

We don't have to solve every problem in copyright law before we bring Internet pirates to justice. False dilemma attempt DENIED.

We don't have to solve every problem before we go after the handful that are currently identified as "pirates." We *do* have to fix at least some of those problems to avoid an endless cycle of only chasing whatever's gotten big enough to get mainstream attention.

How many "pirate sites" do you think there are? Twenty? Fifty? Five hundred? Ten thousand?

Is wikileaks a pirate site? Is History Is A Weapon, which hosts A People's History of the United States with the author's blessing but against the will of the publisher, who may hold the legal rights? Is zinelibrary.info a pirate site, or does its activist approach count as fair use for educational purposes? (Some texts are copyrighted; some are creative commons; some are public domain (mostly those are pre-1963 tracts that were never registered.))

(Mods: I will understand if the exact link gets removed; I would prefer it to be replaced with [online library of activist zines] if it's judged to be too far in the direction of bootleg content.)

In order to effectively "shut down pirate sites," they need to be defined. Which sites are worth spending resources to go after? What should be done to prevent new ones from just springing up in their absence?