High Court orders British ISPs to block "The Pirate Bay"

[HansTWN]

Originally Posted by howyoudoin

Should wikipedia be penalised for linking to pirate sites?

It should be the same as with youtube. If you get notified that you have illegal links on your site then you should take them down immediately. And you should also be proactive, trying to make sure that your users don't post illegal links. The Mobileread moderators take down such links all the time.

[mr ploppy]

Originally Posted by HansTWN

Yes, but advertisers will stay away, and the sites are being pushed into the darker corners of the internet. And you go after the big ones, one by one. It will be come less easy to make money off other people's works and site operators will lose interest. Many casual would-be pirates won't find the new sites.

You can't eradicate hard core piracy, but you can go after the money. Which is what TPB people and similar sites are really after. Piracy will not go away but it will be small time business. Relegated to obscurity, where it belongs.

You deal with piracy the way you deal with petty theft. You make it more difficult, more dangerous, less profitable. This way you greatly reduce it, you will never make it totally go away, of course. This approach should go hand in hand with making legal buying easier, though.

People will just go back to buying their bootleg stuff on CDR / DVDR instead, like they did before TPB got a lot of TV advertising. So the money will still be there, it will just be spread out around a lot more people. Just about every workplace had at least one person everyone went to for their bootlegs, and market stalls were full of them. All TPB and similar did was put those people out of business.

[NightGeometry]

Would TPB be able to bring a charge of libel against the people who bought the case? Or, the indies who use TPB to promote themselves (libel by association?). I know speech in court is protected, but is bringing an action itself capable of being libel?

The obvious thing being - libel is hugely expensive to defend. If everyone promoting bought an action individually it may have an effect. (Hopefully it would just get our libel and defamation laws fixed)

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by NightGeometry

Would TPB be able to bring a charge of libel against the people who bought the case? Or, the indies who use TPB to promote themselves (libel by association?). I know speech in court is protected, but is bringing an action itself capable of being libel?

The obvious thing being - libel is hugely expensive to defend. If everyone promoting bought an action individually it may have an effect. (Hopefully it would just get our libel and defamation laws fixed)

Libel on what grounds? What part of the court's judgement do you believe is untrue? If a statement is true, it cannot be libellous.

[HansTWN]

Originally Posted by mr ploppy

People will just go back to buying their bootleg stuff on CDR / DVDR instead, like they did before TPB got a lot of TV advertising. So the money will still be there, it will just be spread out around a lot more people.

Then you go after those people again. Selling physical bootleg items is much higher risk and you need much more infrastructure. Sure, there will always be crime. But you can't just throw up your hands and say "ok, we will just go ahead and let you break the law since we can't totally eradicate crime". You keep crime to a minimum and everyone wins (except the criminals, of course!). It doesn't take too much effort, actually. Small scale criminals scare easily.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by HansTWN

Then you go after those people again. Selling physical bootleg items is much higher risk and you need much more infrastructure. Sure, there will always be crime. But you can't just throw up your hands and say "ok, we will just go ahead and let you break the law since we can't totally eradicate crime". You keep crime to a minimum and everyone wins (except the criminals, of course!). It doesn't take too much effort, actually. Small scale criminals scare easily.

Precisely. To say "there's no point in taking actions against criminals because it won't eradicate crime" is entirely wrong. Sure there are other pirate sites, and the sort of low-lifes who think it's cool to take other people's stuff without paying for it will probably always find a way to do so, but that doesn't mean that the problem shouldn't be tackled by using the means that the law provides.

[mr ploppy]

Originally Posted by HansTWN

Then you go after those people again. Selling physical bootleg items is much higher risk and you need much more infrastructure.

But who picks up the cost for that? Presumably it would fall on local Trading Standards officers, because they were the ones that I used to see raiding car boots about twice a year in the late 90s. But there's been a lot of cut backs in staffing levels for public sector workers, and I doubt TS have been immune to them. And the workplace sellers wouldn't be anywhere near as easy to catch as the market traders.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by mr ploppy

And the workplace sellers wouldn't be anywhere near as easy to catch as the market traders.

I don't know what sort of place you work in, but the company I work for (a large multinational) has very strict rules about the kind of ethical standards expected from its staff. Using company premises to sell stolen goods would get you fired in no time flat.

[HansTWN]

Originally Posted by mr ploppy

But who picks up the cost for that? Presumably it would fall on local Trading Standards officers, because they were the ones that I used to see raiding car boots about twice a year in the late 90s. But there's been a lot of cut backs in staffing levels for public sector workers, and I doubt TS have been immune to them. And the workplace sellers wouldn't be anywhere near as easy to catch as the market traders.

So you are also saying that police should never try to stop petty theft? That never can be justified on a simple cost-benefit calculation, too. I guess when someone picks your pocket and takes 10 bucks you just laugh it off?

The way I see it, if society makes an effort the level of crime immediately goes down a lot. Why did speeding go down? Because of cameras. People are afraid of getting caught. Even if the cameras weren't loaded, they usually stop speeding or running red lights in that area. So it really isn't that expensive.

[MikeOxlittle]

Originally Posted by HansTWN

Yes, but advertisers will stay away, and the sites are being pushed into the darker corners of the internet. And you go after the big ones, one by one. It will be come less easy to make money off other people's works and site operators will lose interest. Many casual would-be pirates won't find the new sites.

Like I said, censor one site like The Pirate Bay more will just take its place. They can keep going after them but it's a revolving door. It happened with Napster and MP3s and will happen with torrents until the next big sharing protocol is developed.

You can't eradicate hard core piracy, but you can go after the money. Which is what TPB people and similar sites are really after. Piracy will not go away but it will be small time business. Relegated to obscurity, where it belongs.

Trillions of dollars worth of product freely floats around the Web every second of every day, that's not small time business in my opinion.

You deal with piracy the way you deal with petty theft. You make it more difficult, more dangerous, less profitable. This way you greatly reduce it, you will never make it totally go away, of course. This approach should go hand in hand with making legal buying easier, though.

Ideally ... yes.

Realistically ... no.

[HarryT]

So, what would you suggest as an alternative, Mike? Should I, as a software developer who is losing money big-time to piracy just pretend it's not happening and let the bastards get away with it?

[HansTWN]

Originally Posted by MikeOxlittle

Trillions of dollars worth of product freely floats around the Web every second of every day, that's not small time business in my opinion.

You sound like the industry, one download is one lost sale. Actually worse, every time someone looks at an item uploaded to the web you count it one time at full retail value.

I am talking about actual money circulating -- the websites' ad revenues.

[MikeOxlittle]

Originally Posted by HarryT

So, what would you suggest as an alternative, Mike? Should I, as a software developer who is losing money big-time to piracy just pretend it's not happening and let the bastards get away with it?

Develop code which is unhackable and sell it to the music, movie, software and publishing companies and become a gazillionaire.

That's a start.

[MikeOxlittle]

Originally Posted by HansTWN

You sound like the industry, one download is one lost sale. Actually worse, every time someone looks at an item uploaded to the web you count it one time at full retail value.

I am talking about actual money circulating -- the websites' ad revenues.

You're assuming that piracy sites are out there just for ad revenue instead of the free distribution of copyrighted material though.

[tompe]

Originally Posted by HansTWN

It should be the same as with youtube. If you get notified that you have illegal links on your site then you should take them down immediately. And you should also be proactive, trying to make sure that your users don't post illegal links. The Mobileread moderators take down such links all the time.

Youtube store the material and do not just have links.

And the link on The Piratebay is most probably not illegal. Even not in the English court since they evaluated the total site and did not say anything about a single link.

So the question is is it OK for a country to block Wikipeida just because they thing they have pointers to copyrighted material that can be downloaded?