Wow. OK, just to reserve my place in the fight, I'm on Johnlink's side on this one guys. Unfortunately I am on my iPod so you'll have to wait a couple hours for me to make a complete response.
I was responding directly to the idea that there can't be privacy on the internet. I think that my analogy was spot on in that regard. Do you ever use YouTube? I find it incredible hard to believe that if such a law was enacted YouTube would get a pass. And now we have the next problem, what if you watching streaming content that you believe to be legal? That's strike one. What about Google and Yahoo— I can search for pirated materials through search engines, so why wouldn't these places be watched? Who gets to decide what sites are watched and what level of transparency (a cornerstone of every democracy) will this policing body have? Who will they answer to? I'm just confused about where you imagine the lines would fall, my casual observation is that if you give the greedy organizations who are pushing the hardest for these kinds of laws an inch they'll demand ten to one hundred miles more. (note: I'm not saying all org's are greedy, but the RIAA, for example is mighty greedy and underhanded) The right to sell what you bought has never been tied to some concept of quality degradation. I am allowed to buy a car use it to drive to the store and then turn around and sell it the same day later, right? It is now used, though there isn't any wear to car to speak of. The person who buys it from me can do the same thing. I can't use the car anymore, and the car company doesn't get two more sales. No one would question the legality of these transactions. Likewise I can buy a CD, listen to it, decide I hate it, and sell it all on the same day. Perfectly legal. I find this argument ridiculous. Nineteen sales? You've picked a weird tiny number out of the air. I find it hard to believe that even you believe that 19 copies of a game could be passed around millions of times. A pirated version could be downloaded, but if its a legit copy that only one person can use the copy at a time I promise you the sales numbers would be substantially higher. This licensing system some people are trying to force on the consumers is sketchy at best and for lots of reasons that I mentioned in my prior post— though I see the questions I'd raised earlier have been left alone. This kind of system also requires DRM, and I think that DRM helps perpetuate piracy, which perpetuates the "need" for DRM and more invasive laws.
Nobody is looking through your wallet as you walk down the street, no more than anybody would be looking into your online bank accounts. The analogy of probing for shop stalls selling pirated goods is more comparable because that's about the equivalent amount of privacy any of us get when we distribute files over the internet. You talk about a 'slippery slope', as privacy advocates often do, but we wouldn't have seen you complaining about the anti-piracy operations that took place in the 80s and 90s to stop the distribution of illegal tapes and CDs. At the end of the day you're asking for processes that are imbalanced; an advantage for consumers, but implausible for creators to make a living. You need to propose a middle ground solution that is fair on both sides. Despite your, arguably admiral, arguments for the rights of the consumer, at the same time I feel you're disregarding the rights of content creators.
Sorry, I guess I'm not explaining myself clearly. I my analogy is a direct response to this: As far as the rights of content creators go. I feel they have more then enough monetary leverage. Content creators have the RIAA and the MPAA (in the US) to advocate for their rights. Through their actions they have demonstrated that they certainly aren't worried about my rights as a consumer. I'm not saying that they don't have rights, but I am saying that I am not worried about them getting a raw deal.
I know, and I still don't see where your analogy is accurate. It's not *individuals* who are being watched, it's the locations which are distributing pirated material which will be monitored. Those who keep away from those websites should have nothing to worry about. So your privacy fears are unnecessary here. How many of the small music labels or indie video producers are members of the RIAA or MPAA?? Even better, find me a single developer on this forum who is a member of a larger organization that protects their rights?? The fact you've even brought the RIAA into this discussion is short of incredible… What started as a discussion on how to protect indie developers has turned into an emotional argument against big business. You want to take them down in a hail of fire, but who cares about putting a priority toward focusing on the small guys, right? Anyway, I think I've made all my points earlier in this thread. Anything further would be nothing more than a game of ping pong with you.
I'm so bored of people crying at developers choices to fight piracy, as they are quite never giving any alternative proposition. As long as there wouldn't be any magical solution to piracy, there will be obvious flaws. If you can't deal with it, just go further than crying or protesting. Then if you're happy with devs having a raw deal despite some piracy, devs are happy with you playing a good game despite some piracy protection inconveniences. Anyway, who are you to decide if a dev has earned enough money or not ? At last, Jonlink, for god's sake, could you just stop to keep spamming posts and threads about how devs are wrong with every single way to fight piracy ? Do you realize you're trolling a developer forum ? As long as you don't use your brain to find a way that would please everybody, and as long as you will find every attempt to save our work "ridiculous", come on, do us a favor : put us all on ignore.
ugh... Sorry, I seem unable to get this across. It's my fault though, I was in a rush and copied too much of your quote. I am not in any way referring to any of the three strikes you are out policing force. I am only referring to the idea you put forward that the internet isn't a place for privacy. You said, "On the internet you are not private in any shape or form, it's a very public area." I also feel like the asking for middle ground is fairly disingenuous as you don't seem to be willing to even address a lot of the questions I've asked. It seems to me you are looking to make people agree with you. Though, maybe that's something I'm guilty of to an equal degree. I started this thread in the hope that I'd see a decent debate about how DRM works and doesn't and where its future (if any) was. My question and intention was to talk about: But you started talking about legislation. I probably should have ignored that, and would have had I known how far off topic this would get us. This has been a valuable lesson for me on staying on topic. Instead of learning more about people who are for DRM and what their arguments are I've had series of blundersome arguments where neither of us is really listening to the other. I'd love to hear more about your ideas of legislating and censoring the internet. I probably won't agree, but I'd like to know more. Honestly. From the get-go you've been a little light on details, and it's felt like being in a game with someone making up the rules as we go. If you have a link or something to post so that I can read and learn more I'd be happy to.
Okay. Even though you've clarified now I still have to disagree. Everything you do on the internet is recorded; every connection, every exchange of information, it's logged at multiple points along the way. If someone really wanted to, they can view everything you did online today, yesterday, last week. Technologists will tell you that if you have privacy concerns on what you do on the internet, you shouldn't be using the internet. It's something we all need to be very careful of. Which questions are you looking for answers to? Well I know from past topics that you're against DRM, and I agree with that. I think more restrictive DRM is only problematic for the customer and doesn't affect pirates. I simply expressed my opinion that we could remove the need for worsening DRM if the problem of piracy was tackled more effectively at ground level. I only posted one sentence. It was only when a couple of people posted in agreement with me that you responded and turned it into something more.
Well, I have to disagree. I support people's right to privacy on the internet, and while it's true that most things are logged and recorded, it's not very hard to work around that, if you want to be anonymous. You can use tor, for example, to route your traffic through a bunch of volunteer tor nodes around the world so that the web server you're communicating with doesn't know who you are. You can use firefox and edit the preferences to not save your browsing history. You can pay $3/month for cheap web hosting somewhere that gives you access to an ssh account, and tunnel your traffic through that server, and no one operating a website will have any idea who you are. The internet is a huge decentralized network, which means you can't stop people from doing whatever they want on it, no matter how many filters you set up, how many laws you pass, how many websites you block. And I think that's a good thing, what with freedom of speech and all. It's true that people break laws on the internet, and most of that is piracy (and I suppose identity theft). But trying to ban things that people want (like pirated movies, music, and software) isn't really possible, since people can always host stuff in different countries and use proxy servers, and write software that makes this easy to do for non-computer nerds too. Trying to police the internet, and monitoring what everyone does, and giving power to kick people off the internet (I think internet access should be a human right), will just end up being like the war on drugs or the war on terror. It can't be won, but it'll cost a whole lot of money, and it will be used as an excuse to violate people's rights. I'm trying to make a living off of selling software I write too. But I honestly don't think piracy is that much of a threat to my income.
I understand that point of view, and I hear that comment made a lot in piracy discussion … but as soon as someone mentions child porn, or other dangerous materials, are you still in approval of not policing the internet? I don't believe we should allow the internet to have no laws, people can't be merely allowed to do whatever they please when it harms another person.
But there already are laws against child porn and piracy. I can't understand how you justify bringing child porn into the discussion while simultaneously reprimanding a mention of the RIAA. Let's leave both out as they aren't apropos. Finally, I'd just like to say once again. I'm interested in hearing out your views (and I think I've heard that already — as you have mine), but I what I haven't seen is how the policing you feel is necessary would be implemented. I am sure I can google something, but I've heard about this idea a bit before and the opposition seems far more vocal. If you have a link or can tell me in detail how you think it should be, I'd be interested in reading it.
Well of course child porn is horrible. And piracy is bad too. And it's completely reasonable for police to monitor people's activity's on the internet if they're suspected of either. But seeing as how I'm not under investigation for child porn or for pirating copyrighted material, I don't think it's ok to give the police the power to monitor what I'm doing on the internet. Not until they have probably cause that I'm breaking the law. So while I'm fine with police using digital surveillance to catch criminals, I'm not ok at all with police doing surveillance on everyone just in case someone happens to be a criminal. Police use pirated music and child porn as an excuse to conduct illegal laptop searches at airports all the time. That's backwards. Instead, if police want to catch a music pirate, then they should start with their username at torrent sites and expand their search from there. That way they don't have to treat everyone like criminals by default, only actual criminals.
No. no. And no. All seem fair use to me, and I don't know a single music company, movie studio, or game publisher who would care, or prosecute you. I also believe there are consumer laws that protect personal use in each of those cases. But at a more general level, I do believe the copyright holders should continue to reserve that right to prosecute, in the case they ever come across someone operating a large scale unlicensed rental operation, for example, which would be classified under that banner. It's simple. You don't need to watch people, and you don't need to track anyone's traffic. The fairest, most effective, and easiest way to deal with it is to simply require websites (e.g. the pirate bay) to remove copyrighted material (or torrents that link to copyrighted material,) when requested by the copyright owner. P2P services have to do the same, and filter traffic accordingly. Any websites that refuse to remove copyrighted material are reported to whomever the designated independent watchdog is (along with evidence), who will refer any infringing websites to be censored by ISPs until they remove the material. Any non-complying P2P services are blocked until the material is properly filtered by the service manager. I believe this method to be fair for all parties (copyright owners are happy, torrent and P2P websites have a fair chance to go legit), I don't believe there to be any privacy concerns for individuals, and nobody would lose internet access. Jon, do you see any issues with it that I could be missing?
I'm dead tired, but I find that approach interesting and not terrible at all, though it sounds a lot like what the DMCA already is. My only concern would be the review and appeals process. There have been a large number of cases where people and organizations use the DMCA as a tool to silence critics and cast a large net that eliminates fair use (see: one & two & three & four). Of course doing that isn't legal, but often times the victim doesn't have the resources at the disposal of the copyright holders, or they just don't know their rights. I'm all for the theory of your proposal it looks mighty fair on paper. I'd just want lots of things in any such policy that remove the possibility of abuse.
I certainly think copyright holders would need to refer all evidence to an independent agency who would be the ones to determine whether a website is infringing on copyrighted content. In which case, it comes down to the website owner to be responsible for removing it. At any rate, I think it's a better solution than targeting individuals.
