[Excelsior]

(08-03-2012 07:43 PM)Rurik Wrote:  

A lot of piracy sites are going down.

Demonoid is currently down due to a a huge ddos attack.

Megaupload went down, along with a lot of other sites like that.

Piratebay is the main site currently. It doesn't respond to dmca takedowns, it's located in Sweden. If you create a product that gets put on piratebay, it basically gets raped and there's nothing you can do about it.

Do you think something like SOPA will pass, and that most piracy will be stopped in the future? What do you think about it?

Demonoid is down. Piratebay has had its recent struggles. Megaupload is long gone along with Filesonic, Fileserve, Upload.to (in the USA, anyway) and a few other filelockers who took pre-emptive measures.

For every one of the sites I have just listed, dozens more rose up to take their place, and dozens more still are waiting in the wings. Still hundreds more continue to hum along securely, well insulated from any current ruckus and largely (in most cases, almost entirely) unknown to media reports.

I'm not sure you're aware of just how deep this particular rabbit hole goes. Demonoid and Piratebay could disappear completely tomorrow (they won't). It would make very little difference in anything but the immediate term.

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My thoughts on piracy: it's stealing and it kills the economy.

I'd like to hear your treatise as to how precisely internet piracy is a major factor in economic stagnation and/or decline.
I doubt I'll buy it, but let's see you try to sell it first.

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Of course we all like to get things for free, but the internet so far has basically been cyber-communism. If you create something like software, ebooks, video, etc., it can be "shared", and your profits smashed.

The term communism is poorly applied here. The internet is more like a "wild west" than a tightly controlled, ostensibly egalitarian authoritarian state.

I'd actually say that the latter scenario is more in line with the objectives you outline in this post (which are calling for large increases in censorship) than the actual current online environment is or ever will be.

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You can dmca takedown some sites, but on others you can't (like piratebay).

DMCA is most effective against sites with American hosting/domains.

America tries, but it cannot police the world.

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It's really funny that so many people defend piracy, and even say that it's good for the economy, when clearly it isn't. A lot of pirates are people in the middle class who could afford to buy what they are pirating, but don't.

1. "A lot of". How many, exactly?
2. As for those who can afford to do what you say they can, how sure precisely are you that they will? Does the utility of the objects they pirate, in the aggregate, serve as the main factor behind their piracy? Or is it mere convenience that drives the phenomenon forward, with the pirates likely being unwilling to bother with the objects in any capacity were they not so easy to obtain?
Is it a combination of both these things? If so, does the balance favor one or the other?

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If you could walk into an apple store, and just grab ipads and macbook pros off the shelf, apples profits would be in the gutter.

The objects in question are quite distinct here (digital vs. tangible), which makes this analogy rather difficult to apply.
You also cannot assume that the result outlined in this scenario applies, or will apply.

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But defenders of piracy are like "the people who steal the ipads will give it a positive review, and then someone will buy it, and that will help apple". These types of rationalizations make up the bulk of pro-piracy arguments.

Again, digital vs. tangible products. Not the same. The pro-piracy argument you outline is much more applicable to something like a song (where the producers/musicians often depend on word of mouth to raise their profile and generate profits, just a portion of which actually come from album sales) than it is to an IPhone.

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If something like SOPA passes, and the internet is no longer the wild-west of cyber-heists, the american economy is going to get a huge boost. If everyone around the world had to buy american software, movies, music, ebooks, etc., a ton of money would pour into the US, that is currently being cut short by people all over the world stealing what Americans (and elsewhere of course) create.

One problem: they won't have to.

You've assumed that there exists an effective way to halt online piracy. This, in and of itself, is not possible. Much more restrictive policies than SOPA exist in other parts of the world, and even they are unable to accomplish what you seek.

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the american economy is going to get a huge boost...a ton of money would pour into the US

Aside from this, your theory here also seems to have in mind some sort of idea of just how much online piracy costs the US economy, and it seems to have concluded that this amount is enough to make some sort of significant difference in the trajectory of the United States economy.

You seem to be well ahead of all of us if you've already managed to locate that sum (a necessarily vast one, given its ability to impact a multi-trillion dollar economy) and pinpoint it so quickly, while also predicting its side effects down the road.

Want to elaborate on this a bit? Again, I don't think I'll buy it, but I'd like to see what you're trying to sell first.

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Of course, this could only be done if something like SOPA was strictly enforced.

Again, a mere dream. Pass SOPA today and I will have a way around it tomorrow. There will be tens of millions joining me in no time.

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This would mean the internet couldn't be what it currently is. It would mean copyright laws would have to be enforced. A lot of people think this is impossible that it's "just inevitable" that the internet will be "open", and everything "free", so that google can pimp out all the content creators.

"It's not like you're actually going to ENFORCE these EVIL "censorship laws" are you?"

You understand that you need people to support these laws before they go into effect, right?
You sure you're going to be able to convince the majority of the American public to buy into internet censorship?

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SOPA was opposed by google.

...and a veritable cavalry of other players alongside a wide swath of the American public.

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OF COURSE google is opposed to it. They want all the content to be free so that they can put ads on it and make money!

Sure, some of the opposition may have an ulterior motive (whether or not you are correct in making this particular accusation is another matter, but I digress).
What exactly makes you think the other side is also being entirely honest with you?

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SOPA isn't about censorship.

Hmmm....

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It's really just about stopping people from stealing everything on the internet.

...and it just conveniently would have happened to vastly expand the scope of direct control that some power players had over the internet by giving them many powers that would be, in many cases, unchecked, and essentially placing the heart of many American liberties into the hands of said players to do as they wish with little consequence.

Nothing to worry about, I guess. Small details.

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My conclusion is that google and all the other Web 2.0 sites that profit from cyber-communism, set up the massive anti-sopa campaign, which was basically built on lies and misinformation.

You deem the phenomenon you oppose to be evidence of "cyber-communism".

Then you propose censorship as a solution to it.

Interesting...

(08-03-2012 08:33 PM)Rurik Wrote:  

If you work to create something of value in the form of an information product, or anything that can be downloaded, it's going to get pirated and you won't be able to make money. That's a problem. The entire foundation of capitalism is being attacked by piracy.

Piracy is not necessarily an affront to the fundamental ethos of capitalism. It may or may not be considered to be at odds with some of the legal and/or moral concerns in our particular capitalist society, but that does not mean that it is at odds with the fundamentals of capitalism itself. It has, in fact, been used to uphold said fundamentals on more than one occasion.

Something does not have to be lawful (or even moral) to be considered in line with the tenets of what we traditionally consider to be "capitalism".
Large corporations prove this on a regular basis.

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It's true that many things for sale are crap, but that doesn't make sense to lump the people who make good things in with those who make garbage. People should have the right to make something and put a price on it, and be able to protect it. Of course it makes sense that people pirate things, but the problem is if it isn't stopped, it's going to keep hurting our economy, it's going to hurt people who work to make things, to create, to innovate.

You assume they have lost this right, and that this "hurt" is already occuring to some significant extent that will most certainly be reversed were we to put forward a draconian policy like SOPA. Is this reality?

I am not convinced that the damage has been (or will be) as great as you make it out to be.

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If I had to guess, I would say piratebay is going to go down very soon, and that 90 percent of piracy is going to be pretty much put to an end.

The internet is going to be much more tightly monitored in the future, for better or worse.

I'll ignore the claim that piratebay is going down "very soon" (unsubstantiated) and move to the latter call: you have no idea the extent to which pirates pervade the internet, nor do you have any idea of the tools (VPNs, secured P2ps, filelockers, and much, MUCH more) they have at their disposal.

The industry has no way of countering these tools to even a significant degree. You cannot stop the internet. You will not stop the internet.

They are too many, they are too numerous, and they are far, far too smart. In most cases, they know more about the environment they inhabit than those who are trying to stop them. The nature of the beast you're trying to tame is one that simply cannot be subdued in the way you seek.

The industry is quite well aware of this reality (basilransom has already shown as much), even if you are not. They battle now merely to try and cut their losses-in the long term, they will find a way to co-exist with pirates, but the fantasyland you dream of where 90% of pirate activity is gone will simply never come to pass.

They are not going anywhere.

(08-03-2012 09:26 PM)Rurik Wrote:  

One potential avenue for future piracy is selling hard drives. Especially if streaming porn sites were taken down, I could see people selling terabytes of porn.

Streaming tube sites going down?

You mean the same streaming tube sites that once threatened major porn companies/sites, and are now owned and promoted by those same companies/sites?
I won't even get into the amount of content on these tube sites that is generated by semi-pros and plain-old amateurs who place it there themselves for promotion or for shits and giggles (many large tubesites subsist largely on these kinds of content alone).

This is just another fantasy scenario displaying just how far head of you both pirates AND industry actually are. You will never be rid of streaming tube sites-industry knows this, which is why they now work with said sites. They're not going anywhere.

(08-03-2012 10:07 PM)rlongo924 Wrote:  

A website that friends of mine for years used to rip music off of youtube stopped working the other day, I think that the powers that be are starting to crack down a little bit.

And a dozen more rose to take its place.

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But piracy will never end, the younger generation (which a lot of us on here are a part of) don't really view it as being that serious of an offense, so it's virtually impossible to fully phase it out.

Bingo.

There are in actuality many ways to coexist with pirates, and many methods with which to minimize/slow down piracy. Censorship is not one of them, and is bound to fail in any and every way.

Those who fail to realize this are going to pay a very heavy price.