this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2023
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I don't want my local ISP to be making judgments about whether my neighbor is pirating movies or posting hate speech.
But I do want my local ISP to be able to cut off connectivity to a house that is directly abusing neighborhood-level network resources; in order to protect the availability of the network to my house and the rest of the neighborhood.
Back in the early 2000s there was a spate of Windows worms known as "flash worms" or "Warhol worms"¹, which could flood out whole network segments with malware traffic. If an end-user machine is infected by something like this, it's causing a problem for everyone in the neighborhood.
And the ISP should get to cut them off as a defensive measure. Worm traffic isn't speech; it's fully-automated malware activity.
¹ From Andy Warhol's aphorism that "in the future, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes", a Warhol worm is a worm that can take over a large swath of vulnerable machines across the Internet in 15 minutes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warhol_worm
Yeah ok, that's like a gas leak from the gas Co. They come over and help you fix it.
First question: how?
I can't believe people are still making this argument in 2023.
I went to the library and copied a book.
Digital piracy is not theft. There is nothing stolen.
That doesn't make it right, but stop trying to conflate it with larceny. It is NOT analogous.
And in Europe it is perfectly legal for last thousand of years.
Here's a scenario: I'm a wizard with the magical ability to clone any object I point at. I see a person with a Rolex watch on their wrist. I point to it and instantly a perfect copy of that Rolex appears on my wrist.
What got stolen? Who got robbed? Who is deprived of anything? And don't say Rolex got deprived of money, because they still have exactly as much money as before, and nobody is "owed" profit.
If people could be owed profit just because they did work, then I could run around parking lots all day cleaning off people's cars and then forcing them to pay for my services when they got back.
If people could be owed profit just for creating things, I could go around town singing my original music to people passing by and then forcing them to pay for listening to it.
Both of those scenarios are obviously ridiculous.
Pirating digital media is wrong in the same way that poaching unicorns is wrong. It's not, because unicorns don't actually exist, and neither does intellectual property, it's a myth, a fable, a fabrication that is enforced by powerful corpos in order to forcefully extract undeserved profits from a market of artificial scarcity that they created in the first place.
Respond to my scenario I proposed, if I magically cloned an object like a Rolex, what got stolen? Who is deprived of something? What are they deprived of and how?
Nope, I didn't necessarily need the software. The point of that illustration is that people and companies aren't owed profit on something merely because they created it. Money is owned in a mutual social contract, and I don't agree to that contract for purchase. The reason why that's not theft though in the case of digital "piracy" is because Nobody Is Being Deprived Of Anything.
Until you can show me clearly what Rolex or the person wearing the Rolex is being deprived of in that example I gave, theft hasn't been demonstrated because theft means depriving somebody of something against their will or desire. Copying Is Not Theft.
Nope, wrong again. Read what I said more carefully, intellectual property, not just digital. If I go to the library, grab a textbook and hand copy that book onto my own paper, that is totally fine.
If Intellectual property is real, please explain to me how somebody can have an idea "stolen" from them? How would a person be "robbed" of a concept? Here's an idea I'm making up: "Zixatubayponawa" which is a far away land where the rivers are purple sugar water. Tell me how you would "steal" that from me.
Those aren't really good equivalents since in the first example, you're trying to take something away from someone but you fail. The law is not concerned with your skill, just your intent. Attempted murder is illegal even if the victim is still alive.
In the second example, there is absolutely a loss. The barber would have spent time and used resources in order to provide you with that service that they wouldn't get compensated for. Your involvement directly costs them money and time, unlike with piracy where even a billion people pirating won't cost the developer any more money than if those people just never played it to begin with.
Sometimes "legal" is even worse for developers than pirated:
You can legally go to the library, xerox every page in a book and leave. Legally. The publishers and author don't get a penny. What is the difference between that and pirating something online other than it being easier and more convenient?
Unsuccessful attempt to take away? Well, you can point out who was loosing files.
Except saud developers were fired 10 years ago. If you were truly pro-copyright, you would make it personal and inalienable.
Ahoy matey, come aboard the good ship I don’t give a fuck
Theft is taking property with the intention to permanently deprive the owner of it, which you were attempting to do
Technically fraud not theft.
And recordable cassette tapes are going to kill the music industry.
The ordinary court system is quite adequate to resolve that sort of thing.
It begins by showing evidence under penalty of perjury that a crime has actually been committed. Then you can get warrants and subpoenas and so on. You don't get to demand that an ISP shut off a customer just on your say-so.
Many years ago, I was the designated recipient for abuse reports for a large network. We frequently got very firmly-worded demands that we shut off the terrible pirates who were smuggling bootleg copies of The Matrix through various IP addresses on our network.
The problem was ... the IP addresses the complaints mentioned, had never been routed. They had never been connected to the Internet. Those IP addresses had never received so much as a ping packet. They certainly were not sharing copies of The Matrix on Kazaa.
The complaints were not only false, but obviously false to anyone who had even basic technical competence to investigate them.
The "copyright industry" have never even tried to behave as law-abiding citizens with honest legal complaints about other people's conduct. They have consistently perjured themselves, lied to the public, committed felonies against their own customers, demanded dictatorial control over things they don't own (including your own hard drive), and generally acted like a band of clownish goons.
They don't get the benefit of the doubt on anything related to Internet technology, ever.
Copying👏 data👏 is👏 not👏 theft.
Because it is quasi-infinitely replicable. There is nuance and debate to be made, but that's the difference at its core.
You trollin' bruh?
Putting aside the argument that privacy is NOT theft. The argument that piracy hurts creators has been shown to be largely false.
Most of the time the people who pirate software or media wouldn't convert to real sales if the piracy option wasn't there. Those people simply wouldn't buy the product. And even if some of those did convert to real sales, it wouldn't be enough to make or break profits.
Secondly, there's a knock-on benefit to having more people use the product regardless of legitimacy, as it increases word of mouth sales. The more people that talk positively about a product, the more people hear about it, and consequently the more sales you'll make.
Microsoft learned that lesson with Windows licenses. They really don't care if someone has a legitimate license or not. The more people they keep on their platform the more it translates to sales in other ways. I still meet people that have never heard of Linux, because there's a network effect of "everyone uses Windows", despite Linux accounting for around 5% of global desktop marketshare.
Quick edit: this isn't an argument to say that piracy is fine. The point I'm making is that from a logistics perspective, it can actually increase sales in some instances.