You might be interested to know that instead of tracking real criminals like murderers, rapists, serial killers, child molesters, drug dealers and terrorists most of FBI agents are way to busy chasing after Bitorrent tracker admins. Nothing makes me more proud of our law enforcement agencies than seeing them selling out their services to a corporate entities.
Btw, good job on the site take-down notice guys:
Who is your web designer? Cause the 80’s have called, and they want their awesum geocities web design skills back! Seriously, my dog can make a better fucking layout than this. You people are the fucking info-crime division or whatnot, but your page looks like it was made by a 12 year old script kiddie lamer. Get a grip!
Here is a newsflash – copying bits is what computers do. This is what they are built for. This is what we want to use them for. Trying to prevent file sharing is like trying to prevent fish from swimming. You can try and pass laws which claim that fish are not allowed to swim, but that is not going to stop them from doing it.
The funniest thing in all of this is that they really got the wrong guy. The guy who leaked out the Revenge of the Shith workprint, created the torrent and started seeding it is not even mentioned anywhere. Instead they went after a guy who maintained the tracker. Let’s play the analogy game, cause this seems to be all the rage in all copyright related issues.
Let’s imagine that the Elitetorrents website is a crackhouse somewhere in NY. Instead of riding it and catching the dealers, and trying to get to their source FBI stakes out and arrests the landlord who is otherwise a law abiding citizen who lives half a world away somewhere in say Florida. Then they send someone back to NY to quietly change the locks on the door when no one is home and put up an eviction notice. All the drug dealers go free, movie in across the street and start over again. The only person who gets charged and sentenced is the poor guy whose only crime was turning a blind eye to what was going down on his property. This is precisely what happened in Elitetorrents case.
Does that seem right? Of course not. But in the digital world, catching all the uploaders and downloaders is not feasible. There are about 300 million potential file sharers in this country, and MPAA/RIAA would have to arrest every single one of them just to be sure.
So we end up with a situation in which people who are not really guilty get sentenced, and the real infringes just keep doing their thing. The system is obviously broken.
Update Sat 10/28/2006 12:11am → Tarmle makes this even clearer than me go read this awesome post on the topic.
[tags]copyright, copyfight, injustice, mpaa, torrent, elitetottents[/tags]
Ha ha, hope he thinks that copy of Star Wars was worth it when he gets AIDS in prison. Thieves suck.
Yes, dear n00b – thieves suck. But I don’t see how that pertains to this post. Neither my post, nor the article I linked too said anything about any theft being committed.
Oh wait… I get it now. You are one of the under-educated ignorant people fooled into the false belief that intellectual property can be owned just like physical property.
Heh… It’s kinda cute actually – just like the retarded kittens or a fuzzy lab monkey after lobotomy. I must say, you picked a very fitting nickname.
Anyways, when you choose to stop blindly buying into propaganda, and bending over for the copyright terrorists feel free to join us in the awesome land of common sense. You see, from where I’m sitting this dude did not commit any theft. Hell, he hardly even committed copyright infringement. The dude was an accessory to a crime – a proxy at best.
His crime was lending bandwidth and CPU cycles to real infringers in order for them to exchange illegally obtained data. If you read his sentence, it says “conspiracy to commit infringement” not theft. Sorry to break it to you pal, but your wrong on all counts.
From where you’re sitting? Haha, that’s hilarious. You keep sitting there, because in this thing called THE REAL WORLD, your pal will be taking it up the ass from Bubba shortly.
But you just keep in your state of denial and pretend that he’s not in jail and that all content creators expect no compensation for their work — like most of your ilk, the only think you’ve ever created is probably a burger with or without a side of fries.
Ok, please tell me where does it say theft in:
That dude is in jail because the system is broken. There are approximately 300 million more of us in this country. We are all just as guilty as this guy. What is our crime? Copying bits. Are they going to put us all in jail?
Can you honestly say you have never violated copyright in your life? You never made a mix tape for your girlfriend? You never “borrowed” a game from a friend? You never watched a copyrighted clip on youtube? If you did, you are just as guilty as all of us.
As a society we are all pathological infringers. Thanks to the technology breaking the law is more natural and convenient than obtaining copyrighted material the legal way. We either change the law or stop technological progress altogether.
Every year we get better and more efficient at transmitting data. Every year it is easier to share ideas with other people on the global scale. DRM doesn’t work because no one wants it. It is not the answer, and everyone knows it.
The current business model of MPAA, RIAA and the likes can only be sustained at the cost of technological roadblock. Stop cultural exchange, prohibit any copying, kill the fair use, and censor all communications – that is the only way to continue this. Entertainment industry is hard at work to implement this cultural nightmare, and people like you are helping them.
They were doing the same shit when first cassette recorders appeared. They did the same thing when we got first VCR’s. They also were not happy about CD and DVD burners. Every single time a new technology that allows for efficient copying and distribution of data appears, entertainment industry freaks out.
They simply have to learn how to work p2p into their business model just like they did with all the other technologies. If they don’t they will just have to keep suing people, and chasing ghosts.
People will just keep moving from network, to network, from protocol to protocol. They will use encryption, proxies, port redirection, tunneling and etc… 30 years from now we will still be sitting here and debating the same damn old thing.
But fine, don’t listen to me. Don’t listen to any of us. Just keep signing your consumer rights away. Give up on fair use, and kill the public domain.
Good luck!
The Real World™ is just a show on TV, and in case you didn’t know it is scripted and lame. Only on TV you get the clear distinction between good and evil. In reality, there are no absolutes. While laws should to be respected and followed they are not always right. They are arbitrary rules that are meant to be changed and amended over time.
When copyright law was created, no one could foresee or predict the internet or file sharing. This set of rules is currently broke, and needs to be revised.
However a very strong corporate group of lobbyists has a vested interest in keeping these archaic laws unchanged. And despite the popular belief, the people that care the most about these laws are not content creators, but the distributors.
The internet makes their elaborate distribution channels and carefully built networks irrelevant. Content creators should and will be compensated. But fuck the MPAA and RIAA. I don’t care if they go out of business and perish.
Talented people creating quality content will always be around, and we will build new systems of distributing their work that will include compensation, and reward schemes.
But that probably won’t happen in my lifetime because people like you won’t let it happen. Sigh…
I don’t want this to turn into an argument so I’ll just keep it at that. You can go ahead and post your rebuttal, but I’ll probably just sit that one out and let you have the last word – unless of course you post something really clever that would be worth responding to.
If I don’t reply that means we have reached a point where you have not contributed anything new or meaningful to the conversation and there is just no point for me to reiterate what I already posted.