Quote:
Originally Posted by sirbruce
I'm not sure explicitly aiding copyright violation is wrong on it face. See the thread where some people can't even agree that copyright violation is wrong, period. Or the thread regarding whether or not certain python scripts explicitly aid in copyright violation.
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You'll
always be able to find people who don't believe violating a law is wrong. There are people who don't believe rape or child molestation is wrong, either. What the Pirate Bay guys were doing was explicitly bragging about helping people break the law. They didn't even have the common decency to be discrete about it.
The Python script in question doesn't aid in copyright violation, from what I can tell. All that script does is provide a PID so that you can buy Mobipocket books (if I'm understanding which Python script you're talking about). It's certainly arguable that a script which allows you to strip DRM off of a file is a violation of copyright, but I think that's much more of a stretch. You're not "copying" anything when you use such a mechanism, and you're not making anything
available to be copied to anyone else. It's certainly a
necessary step towards copyright violation, but it's not copyright violation in and of itself, as there are fair use reasons one would want to remove the DRM from an e-book (e.g., your Kindle dies and you want to read your book on your PC). That's not to say that it's legal under the DMCA. I don't know if it is, and I suspect it's not, but the DMCA involves more than just copyright, strictly speaking.
Quote:
Originally Posted by sirbruce
Even if we could agree that copyright violation is wrong, providing tools or mechanisms to make it easier for other people to commit copyright violation is not necessarily wrong. Even if those tools were originally intended to commit copyright violation.
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Providing tools that
allow someone to commit copyright violation isn't wrong. In fact, there are lots of mechanisms (photocopying, faxing, digital imaging, OCR, speech-to-text) that
can be used for copyright violation. It actually takes some work to implement a mechanism to
prevent copyright violation for any device which allows digital reproduction. What sets The Pirate Bay apart from, say, TiVo, is the fact that the people that ran The Pirate Bay treated copyright law with
contempt, and apparently continue to do so. In addition, because torrent files contain metadata, and because users have to register their e-mail addresses before they can upload torrents, they could, if they wanted to, ban users that try to seed copyrighted material (or at least any material that they receive complaints about). Because of the e-mail and the metadata involved, this should be a trivial matter for programmers.
But the fact of the matter is, they
intended to violate copyrights, and they were proud of it. The fact that they hosted ads on the site shows where they were really coming from: They were all about the money, and knew that copyrighted material drove people to their site (not unlike Napster, in ye olden days). It's actually a weird kind of dichotomy. On one hand, they act like greedy little leeches, while on the other, their anti-copyright stance makes
Richard Stallman look like
Gordon Gekko.
The underlying technology for The Pirate Bay is little more than glorified FTP writ large. Sending and receiving data is the whole purpose of the Internet, after all. The problem with The Pirate Bay and the like (as opposed to other sites, which let you host files in a more neutral way) is that they were sending and receiving data which they
knew was violating someone's intellectual property rights. They knew it because that's what they
intended. The people that started The Pirate Bay weren't neutral about the enforcement of copyright and intellectual property laws in general. Thy want to see them destroyed.