Dotcom raid illegal

[stonetools]

It is not so trivial to go after facilitators without, at the same time, hurting the infrastructure.

Its also possible to go after facilitators without hurting the infrastructure. Let me repost what I said elsewhere:

In just about every one of these discussions, the piracy enablers argue how complex the issue is, stress how carefully we should move, explain how we need to rewrite the law from the ground up, and how much study is needed. They seem to move on a time line where we won’t be ready for a solution until we all have long green tendrils instead of fingers and toes!

Eventually, this delaying tactic will be ended when the governments get tired of waiting and impose their own less than perfect solutions. Astoundingly, the Internet won’t be broken, despite much techie caterwauling to the contrary. It will just be more law abiding.

[Ankh]

Originally Posted by HarryT

From their "About Us" page:

Well, I was mistaken.

I still don't like the pressure (perceived or real) that this puts on the basic technology, as it pushes the burden of prevention of abuse to service provider, making them responsible for illegal acts done by others (who frequently get away).

[HarryT]

It wouldn't surprise me in the least to see RapidShare taken down. I strongly suspect that the majority of their content is pirated material. But, for the moment at least, they're still there.

[cjr72]

I don't remember if I've used Rapidshare in the past but I do know that makers of custom ROMs for my android phone make use of these type of sites to distribute them. If a site is found to actively promote piracy, refuses to comply with legitimate take down notices, etc, sure go after that site but there are substantial legitimate uses for this technology. Tools like this should not be neutered across the board because of a few bad actors. If someone murders somebody with a butcher knife you don't counter that by insisting from now everyone can only use plastic butter knives.

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Perhaps it's so self-evident that it doesn't need saying? I'm sure that the overwhelming majority of us are against piracy.

"Against piracy" is not the same as "people who download a couple of songs or an ebook should be prosecuted." And I was speaking of the wider coverage... I see news articles & blogs about the Megaupload case, arguing whether the servers should-or-should-not be returned, over whether bad paperwork nullifies the case, and so on, but even on the blogs and news-ish sites that say "piracy is EVIL; throw them in prison and we'll sort out whether there's legal evidence later," aren't saying, "the FBI/CIA should be going through Megaupload's servers, tracking every U.S.-based user who ever downloaded a movie or song, and throwing them in jail."

There is *zero* interest in going after the end users who made Megaupload profitable. There is zero interest in going after advertisers who paid for ads on those sites. There's interest in shutting down the site, and a couple of similar sites... I haven't seen any movement to find out who the "power users" were, and making a "no web list" of people who, like the no-fly list, are considered too dangerous to the public to allow internet access.

That, of course, would be ridiculously draconian. But considering some of the punishments I see recommended for other crimes, I wouldn't be surprised to see it *suggested.* I am surprised not to see any public demands for punishment of the people who were directly using MU to infringe copyrights, rather than punishment for the people who facilitated the process.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by Elfwreck

"Against piracy" is not the same as "people who download a couple of songs or an ebook should be prosecuted."

What do you think would justify prosecution? If 2 files is not enough, is 10? is 100? 1000? Where would you draw the line?

[tompe]

Originally Posted by HarryT

What do you think would justify prosecution? If 2 files is not enough, is 10? is 100? 1000? Where would you draw the line?

Why do you think it is reasonable to ask for a "line"? And I also do not think people are againts piracy just because it is illegal.

The real think that most people are against is "actions that in the long run leads to less interesting creative creation" or something like that. Then it is just an empirical question to decide what holds for each action.

So to me it seems like some kind of fallacy to claim or believe that most people are against piracy.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by tompe

And I also do not think people are againts piracy just because it is illegal.

I don't either; I think that most people are against piracy because they think it's wrong to take stuff without paying for it. (In cases where the owner requires payment, to forestall the nit-pickers.)

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by HarryT

What do you think would justify prosecution? If 2 files is not enough, is 10? is 100? 1000? Where would you draw the line?

I am not a judge, police officer, nor member of any legislative body. It is not my job to decide where exactly those lines should be, and my livelihood doesn't depend on copyright enforcement.

I can say what I'd prefer, what, as a citizen, I think is a reasonable use of my tax moneys. I think that criminal prosecution should be based on harm--either harm to a specific victim, or societal harm wherein a victim isn't identifiable, but the actions cause damage to all of us if left unmanaged. (Environmental laws come into play here; there's no specific victim if I burn toxic materials in front of my house, but it makes the whole neighborhood less safe.)

And I think the effort of prosecution and the penalties should be based on the harm done. So: no three-year prison sentences for a fistfight in which the end result was bruises, and no spending dozens of hours of cop-time trying to find out who was in the fight. No three-year-investigations into a single case of petty theft or minor mayhem (smashing a car window).

Sorting out *how much harm occurs* is one of the key issues that the anti-piracy activists are refusing to address. They throw around quotes about how many millions of dollars the industry (whatever industry) has lost in the last X years, but they don't talk about specifics.

I can say that driving is unsafe, freeways are dangerous, and point to statistics about auto accidents, and insist that car manufacturers are involved in a "death industry" and should be stopped--but if I can't show the damage as being so much more than the amount of good caused by cars, I'll be ignored. And yet, the anti-piracy industry seems to claim that the "damage" caused by p2p or cloud-storage sites is so immense that the *value* of those technologies is irrelevant... and also, unlike people insisting on safety features for cars, being able to prove specific damage is irrelevant.

If you found someone who'd downloaded & used one of your programs without buying it, what penalty would you like them to face? How big a fine, how much jail time? Would your preferences change if you knew their life circumstances? (If they were a college student living in poverty, vs a CEO who just likes shortcuts?) If you overheard a conversation in a pub that led you to believe one of the people had downloaded some of your books, how would you like that traced--how much effort should which authorities spend to find the person?

And do you want them spending that much effort going after *every* claim of copyright infringement?

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by Elfwreck

If you found someone who'd downloaded & used one of your programs without buying it, what penalty would you like them to face? How big a fine, how much jail time?

No, I don't think anyone should go to jail for downloading copyrighted material. Under most circumstances it's a civil offence, not a criminal one.

What should the penalty be? It should be in line with other such "non-payment" offences, I think. I was on the subway recently, and noticed a sign saying that you'd be fined 50x the price of a ticket if you were found not to have one. That's probably the right order of magnitude for such an offence. Fine a few dozen times the commercial value of the downloaded material. That would be my personal preference.

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by HarryT

What should the penalty be? It should be in line with other such "non-payment" offences, I think. I was on the subway recently, and noticed a sign saying that you'd be fined 50x the price of a ticket if you were found not to have one. That's probably the right order of magnitude for such an offence. Fine a few dozen times the commercial value of the downloaded material. That would be my personal preference.

That's what most of us think... should be "the price of the item, and enough more that there's a solid incentive to buy it legitimately next time, and to convince people considering the same thing that it's not worth it."

Fines of $50,000 per downloaded file just convince the public that the law is so ridiculous that it can be ignored. Especially since what counts as a "violation" includes actions many of us think are entirely reasonable--like DRM-stripping, or sharing an ebook with one's spouse or children.

But the penalty amount is just part of the issue--the other part is prosecution. When should it be considered to cross the line from civil to criminal, requiring gov't action, and how much effort should they spend tracking down which offenses?

I'm not against prosecuting copyright violations, neither at the civil or criminal level. I *am* against loss of privacy and liberty in order to go after violations that, for the most part, I'm not seeing the damage from.

I hope the whole Dotcom case gets thrown out, and that legislative forces get the message that they *can* go after copyright infringement--but they're just as bound to follow the law as they are in murder cases. That if they can't be bothered to get their facts straight and comply with judges' requirements, they don't get to prosecute, because that's how the law works.

And there is *no* reason I should accept, "the feds don't need to follow the technicalities of the law" at the same time they're preaching "well, we can't pin down how much damage is actually done by this filesharing, but they damn well broke the law and we're going after them for that." If their argument for spending all the time and money on these cases is "that's the LAW, and if the law is unjust, change it, but for now, we enforce the LAW"--they need to be just as firm about following the law on their side of the activities.

[teh603]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Were they? Sites like "RapidShare" still appear to be very much alive.

A lot of them blocked connections from US IPs, at least in the weeks following the Dotcom raid. Nobody wanted the US to suddenly come crashing in on a moralistic crusade.

[Ankh]

Our legal system is not designed to cope with massive violations of the rules (we declare martial law when it hits the fan), and that is the biggest problem at this time. The issue is not individual damage done by one person downloading ebook, song or movie, the issue is cumulative effect.

From that standpoint, takedown of Megaupload has its own logic, it is attacking the infrastructure that makes it easy to abuse copyright. For individual persecution of violators to work as a defence of the system, the "noise" level has to come down first.

Which is easier said than done.

[tompe]

Originally Posted by HarryT

I don't either; I think that most people are against piracy because they think it's wrong to take stuff without paying for it. (In cases where the owner requires payment, to forestall the nit-pickers.)

And I definitely does not think that is true either since most people know the difference between copying something and taking something.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by tompe

And I definitely does not think that is true either since most people know the difference between copying something and taking something.

Despite your protestations to the contrary, I believe that most people do know the difference between right and wrong, and think that taking things without paying is wrong.