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

[mr ploppy]

Originally Posted by Elfwreck

Don't be ridiculous. There's no need for violence. All we have to do to prevent car theft is paint the owner's name on the front of the car and etch pictures of all authorized drivers into the windows.

Make the wheels square, then even if they did get stolen they wouldn't be able to go very fast. And if anyone still gets accused of stealing a car we could ban them from buses and trains too. Or maybe just ban cars completely in any countries where car theft is a problem. I'm sure one of those, or a combination of all 3 would work. And if not we could always try something else.

[tompe]

Originally Posted by HansTWN

I am no writer, musician, or in any other way affected by piracy. I am 100% on the other side of the fence.

The point is, how can you justify the downloader getting something for free? What has he or she done to deserve it? No matter what or if there is any damage, no matter if anyone notices it. What gives the downloader the right to just take what doesn't belong to him?

I am looking at it purely from the downloaders state of mind. How does he justify it? This is the important question. Forget what others are doing, who else did something wrong or immoral. The downloader had no book, song, movie before he downloaded. After "the act" he has a copy of something that costs money. How is this right?

Deserve it? What have you done to deserve to breathe the air you are using?

You can also see it as that downloading increase the total happiness in the world. How do you motivate not increasing the happiness in the world. What is wrong with you?

[stonetools]

Not all lawyers' works, but all legal opinions and court rulings, are in the public domain in the US. Lawyers don't get a choice about copyrighting many of their most complicated and influential creative works.

This may surprise you, EW, but most lawyers get paid for doing such work. Indeerd, many insist ion getting paid even before doing such work. I imagine, too, that even if you donate some of your work, that you insist on getting paid for the work you contract to do.

Nobody said, "I oppose any attempt at law enforcement against piracy." Several people have spoken in favor of legal action against piracy--in cases where evidence is brought to a court, and a plaintiff and defendant both have the right to present a case, and a ruling is made by a jury.

Actually, a couple people here do oppose any attempt at law enforcement , because piracy should not be illegal .Others describe it as a minimal, annoying , harmless affair, not worthy of effort at law enforcement. And still others seem that to say that any attempt at LE would inevitably violate the civil rights of the innocent. So f ar, I think its a minority who have spoken in favor of any form of law enforcement.

The objection is not to law enforcement but to an attempt to circumvent the need for court cases by imposing restrictions on people and organizations who aren't directly breaking laws, but whose legal actions allows lawbreaking to go on in their presence. Courts going after ISPs for activities being coordinated through TPB are punishing a lot of ancillary people; if those breaking the law are the uploaders & downloaders, find them.

Would you apply that rule, to say, child pornography? Because ISPS are in fact ordered to block child porn sites. In the USA, gambling sites are blocked.
As for laws for finding and punishing uploaders& downloaders, you and many others here appear to oppose any such laws.

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by stonetools

Would you apply that rule, to say, child pornography? Because ISPS are in fact ordered to block child porn sites. In the USA, gambling sites are blocked.
As for laws for finding and punishing uploaders& downloaders, you and many others here appear to oppose any such laws.

I'm opposed to any laws that require ISPs to block/deny/restrict in any kind of blanket capacity. ISPs shouldn't have to do police/investigative work. If the authorities suspect criminal activity, there are already legal processes in place to handle those situations. Apply for a court order for the ISP to submit traffic logs for the parties in question and take them to court if/when appropriate.

Law enforcement doesn't need new "internet tools" to deal with criminal activity on the internet. They only want them because it will make their jobs easier.

Roads go right by many criminal's homes. Should the Department of Transportation be required to put up barricades in front of their driveways when they're discovered, and collect information on them for the police? Are the phone companies required to terminate the phone service of businesses that are suspected of criminal activities?

[nogle]

Originally Posted by Ninjalawyer

This, a thousand times this. Some can't separate the process from the result; if The Pirate Bay is bad, then anything you do to stop it must be okay because stopping it is okay. If you disagree with the process, then somehow you must be supporting piracy generally.

Indeed. It is the same mindset that has resulted in governors on all commercial trucks in Canada. Since it isn't legal to speed, there is no reason to go faster than the top posted speed limit. How long until governors are installed on all vehicles and horsepower is limited, since you can't use it anyway? And then the next step is to install some sort of snitching device on all cars to let law enforcement know you are/have been speeding and thus deserve a ticket.

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by nogle

Indeed. It is the same mindset that has resulted in governors on all commercial trucks in Canada. Since it isn't legal to speed, there is no reason to go faster than the top posted speed limit.

I used to wonder, when the speed limit in the entire US was 55mph, why cars weren't equipped with something that just prevented them from ever going faster, with possible exceptions for emergency vehicles.

It'd be easy to phrase a law that says "everything posted on the internet must be approved as not-infringing before it goes live"--it'd just be horrifically expensive to enforce, and it'd shut down a lot of businesses. The problem isn't "how to go after the lawbreakers;" it's "how to find the lawbreakers whose activities aren't objectively different from activity we want to promote, except by measurement against some set of criteria that can't be defined by code?"

Or, What colour are your bits?:

In intellectual property and some other fields we're very interested in information, data, artistic works, a whole lot of things that I'll summarize with the term "bits". Bits are all the things you can (at least in principle) represent with binary ones and zeroes. And very much of intellectual property law comes down to rules regarding intangible attributes of bits - Who created the bits? Where did they come from? Where are they going? Are they copies of other bits? Those questions are perhaps answerable by "metadata", but metadata suggests to me additional bits attached to the bits in question, and I'd like to emphasize that I'm talking here about something that is not properly captured by bits at all and actually cannot be, ever. Let's call it "Colour", because it turns out to behave a lot like the colour-coded security clearances of the Paranoia universe.

[nogle]

Originally Posted by stonetools

[/I]
After all, I'm sure you oppose car theft and also support law enforcement against car theft. You don't go around saying, "Any attempt to punish car thieves MUST lead to a violation of the rights of us all."

I oppose car theft. Therefore, I support police setting up roadblocks to stop every car to check license, registration and insurance with the result being that if your license and registration don't match, you are sent directly to jail and the car impounded until you can prove you are legally in possession of the car.

Actually, I oppose all theft, so I am in favour of police carrying out random searches of residences, vehicles and anywhere else to look for stolen goods; the collection of warrants for those searches just gives the criminals the opportunity to dispose of the goods, and cleary get in the way of effective law enforcement.

As well, I support the closing of all flea markets and car boot sales since they are places known to traffick in stolen goods.

And don't get me started on the trafficking of drugs in schools...

[HansTWN]

Originally Posted by nogle

I oppose car theft. Therefore, I support police setting up roadblocks to stop every car to check license, registration and insurance with the result being that if your license and registration don't match, you are sent directly to jail and the car impounded until you can prove you are legally in possession of the car.

You oppose car theft. So do you support police closing down that big meeting they have every Saturday where they sell cars, more than 99% of which are stolen? Or do you say, "I heard that someone actually sold a car that belonged to him there 1 year ago, that was legal!" How about: "Hey, they will just go to the next empty parking lot 5 miles down the road, so let's do nothing?"

[nogle]

Originally Posted by HansTWN

You oppose car theft. So do you support police closing down that big meeting they have every Saturday where they sell cars, more than 99% of which are stolen? Or do you say, "I heard that someone actually sold a car that belonged to him there 1 year ago, that was legal!" How about: "Hey, they will just go to the next empty parking lot 5 miles down the road, so let's do nothing?"

Do I support closing down that big meeting where mostly stolen cars are sold?

No. It seems to me that if the criminals are freely congregating somewhere, this would be an ideal location to do some investigations. To close it down would deprive me of a valuable investigative resource.

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by HansTWN

You oppose car theft. So do you support police closing down that big meeting they have every Saturday where they sell cars, more than 99% of which are stolen? Or do you say, "I heard that someone actually sold a car that belonged to him there 1 year ago, that was legal!" How about: "Hey, they will just go to the next empty parking lot 5 miles down the road, so let's do nothing?"

Are they proposing to close it down, or just rename the street signs nearby and hope that nobody can operate a map well enough to find it anyway?

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by Elfwreck

Are they proposing to close it down, or just rename the street signs nearby and hope that nobody can operate a map well enough to find it anyway?

I think the plan is to simply redact the existing street signs. Too expensive to rename them.

[nogle]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

I think the plan is to simply redact the existing street signs. Too expensive to rename them.

Just erase them from the GPS sattelites and noone can find them...

[SteveEisenberg]

Originally Posted by nogle

It seems to me that if the criminals are freely congregating somewhere, this would be an ideal location to do some investigations.

So do you see The Pirate Bay to be an ideal location for the police to investigate illegal downloaders? What would be their investigative tools? Get subpoenas to trace back IP addresses, perhaps? Then get individual court orders to go into people's houses, confiscate their computers, and make a forensic examination of their hard drives?

I would say no to the above, because it is too expensive.

I'd be OK with something like the French system, although I don't think fines need to be that high. The idea of warnings followed by slowing down your internet connection, planned for the US later this year, seems about right to me.

[Ninjalawyer]

Originally Posted by stonetools

[/I]
FTFY. Good on you for doing pro bono work, but I'm sure you don't want ALL your work to be Pro bono

I have no idea what your talking about with respect to doing pro bono work. My work ends up on websites with or without my permission, and it's certainly not pro bono.

Originally Posted by stonetools

You know, these seem to me to be weasel words. If you actually are against piracy,then you need to suggest what legal process that YOU would find acceptable. Saying that " I oppose piracy, but then I oppose any attempt at law enforcement against piracy" leads me to suspect that you actually don't oppose piracy at all.
After all, I'm sure you oppose car theft and also support law enforcement against car theft. You don't go around saying, "Any attempt to punish car thieves MUST lead to a violation of the rights of us all."

The above reasoning is exactly what I'm talking about, the "If you're not with us, you're against us" line of reasoning. There's no particular logical reason why I must imagine some new regime that carefully balances the needs of copyright holders and the public just to comment on copyright that goes too far. Of course, I have already suggested a process I would find acceptable - i.e. that websites not be censored without the website owner being given the opportunity to present arguments and certainly not without a judge balancing the harm of censorship against the harm that the site causes.

The suggestion that I'm a secret pirate because I don't support the UK approach is a little embarrassing. As for your analogy, well it's a clear example of the false analogy fallacy.

[yoho]

Originally Posted by danskmacabre

They're fighting a losing battle. Won't make any difference at all.
Anyone who accesses TPB will use other sites or a workaround to access TPB anyway (directly or indirectly).

good point! it's absolutely a losing battle.