Bittorrent Creator A Digital Pirate? 386
Alex_Ionescu writes "According to an article in Wired, the old webpage of Bram Cohen contained a manifesto stating that his goal for creating software was to 'Commit Digital Piracy'. Cohen argues that the quote is taken out of context and represents a parody. He argues having written it in 1999, 2 years before even coming up with Bittorrent. You can find the archived copy of his site at archive.org. From the article: "Cohen has never publicly encouraged piracy, and he has consistently maintained that he wrote BitTorrent as a legitimate file-distribution tool. That would seem to make him and his budding company, BitTorrent, safe under the Grokster ruling. But legal experts worry the newly discovered manifesto extolling 'digital piracy' could put him on less certain legal ground."
Expect an escalation in the war... (Score:5, Informative)
[This was written in late 1999, and is a parody of a cypherpunk's manifesto, which struck me as very dishonest manifesto claiming to solely be concerned about privacy. This screed is written in the exaggerated voice of a 'prototypical' cypherpunk, making much more direct declarations of his intent.]
I am a technological activist. I have a political agenda. I am in favor of basic human rights: to free speech, to use any information and technology, to purchase and use recreational drugs, to enjoy and purchase so-called 'vices', to be free of intruders, and to privacy.
I further my goals with technology. I build systems to disseminate information, commit digital piracy, synthesize drugs, maintain untrusted contacts, purchase anonymously, and secure machines and homes. I release my code and writings freely, and publish all of my ideas early to make them unpatentable.
Technology is not a panacea. I refuse to work on technology to track users, analyze usage patterns, watermark information, censor, detect drug use, or eavesdrop. I am not naive enough to think any of those technologies could enable a 'compromise'.
Despite my emphasis on technology, I do not view laws as inherently evil. My goals are political ones, even if my techniques are not. The only way to fundamentally succeed is by changing existing laws. If I rejected all help from the political arena I would inevitably fail.
-Bram Cohen
***
Assuming Cohen actually ascribed to this parody of the "'prototypical' cypherpunk manifesto", it sounds like bittorrent would be an expression of free speech and a form of political protest to me.
It will be interesting to say the least to see what effect the decision has on both innovation in general and the subsequent to be expected abuses by [insert your favorite copyright holder here].
RTFA and follow the link back (Score:2, Informative)
Karma Whore: cypherpunk manifesto (Score:2, Informative)
A Cypherpunk's Manifesto
by Eric Hughes
Privacy is necessary for an open society in the electronic age. Privacy is not secrecy. A private matter is something one doesn't want the whole world to know, but a secret matter is something one doesn't want anybody to know. Privacy is the power to selectively reveal oneself to the world.
If two parties have some sort of dealings, then each has a memory of their interaction. Each party can speak about their own memory of this; how could anyone prevent it? One could pass laws against it, but the freedom of speech, even more than privacy, is fundamental to an open society; we seek not to restrict any speech at all. If many parties speak together in the same forum, each can speak to all the others and aggregate together knowledge about individuals and other parties. The power of electronic communications has enabled such group speech, and it will not go away merely because we might want it to.
Since we desire privacy, we must ensure that each party to a transaction have knowledge only of that which is directly necessary for that transaction. Since any information can be spoken of, we must ensure that we reveal as little as possible. In most cases personal identity is not salient. When I purchase a magazine at a store and hand cash to the clerk, there is no need to know who I am. When I ask my electronic mail provider to send and receive messages, my provider need not know to whom I am speaking or what I am saying or what others are saying to me; my provider only need know how to get the message there and how much I owe them in fees. When my identity is revealed by the underlying mechanism of the transaction, I have no privacy. I cannot here selectively reveal myself; I must always reveal myself.
Therefore, privacy in an open society requires anonymous transaction systems. Until now, cash has been the primary such system. An anonymous transaction system is not a secret transaction system. An anonymous system empowers individuals to reveal their identity when desired and only when desired; this is the essence of privacy.
Privacy in an open society also requires cryptography. If I say something, I want it heard only by those for whom I intend it. If the content of my speech is available to the world, I have no privacy. To encrypt is to indicate the desire for privacy, and to encrypt with weak cryptography is to indicate not too much desire for privacy. Furthermore, to reveal one's identity with assurance when the default is anonymity requires the cryptographic signature.
We cannot expect governments, corporations, or other large, faceless organizations to grant us privacy out of their beneficence. It is to their advantage to speak of us, and we should expect that they will speak. To try to prevent their speech is to fight against the realities of information. Information does not just want to be free, it longs to be free. Information expands to fill the available storage space. Information is Rumor's younger, stronger cousin; Information is fleeter of foot, has more eyes, knows more, and understands less than Rumor.
We must defend our own privacy if we expect to have any. We must come together and create systems which allow anonymous transactions to take place. People have been defending their own privacy for centuries with whispers, darkness, envelopes, closed doors, secret handshakes, and couriers. The technologies of the past did not allow for strong privacy, but electronic technologies do.
We the Cypherpunks are dedicated to building anonymous systems. We are defending our privacy with cryptography, with anonymous mail forwarding systems, with digital signatures, and with electronic money.
Cypherpunks write code. We know that someone has to write software to defend privacy, and since we can't get privacy unless we all do, we're going to write it. We publish our code so that our fellow Cypherpunks may practice and play with it. Our code is free for all to use, worldwide.
Re:Promotion to Adjourn (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Bram is screwed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Watch what you print.... (Score:3, Informative)
Errrm. No. I meant "Google Groups."
Great. Another screwup, immortalized for all time. This time, by Google Web.
Or do they cache comments?
Bram Unispiring at SXSW (Score:3, Informative)
He didn't care what people downloaded because mainstream music and films were a waste of time. He didn't want to talk about what should or shouldn't happen with RIAA and MPAA suits.
My favorite quote, "I don't like computers... they're really annoying to deal with... they never work right... I have to use them for work, but if I could avoid them, I would...".
This guy is a software developer with the ability to fix the things he doesn't like... but doesn't.
When asked what he did care about, he responds that he's a programmer and he likes doing "networking stuff", but when someone who helped develop the UDP standard asked what he would change, he says he doesn't care.
You can watch the interview for yourself here...
http://server1.sxsw.com/sxsw2/2005_coverage/bram_
Re:Only in America... (Score:3, Informative)
First of all, he's *not* being prosecuted.
Secondly, things you say in the past can come back to haunt you in the future. Duh. Haven't you ever seen an election? They go back 30 years looking for dirt on candidates. (Given, Cohen's not running for office, but it's still a 'duh' issue.) This applies in every nation on Earth, not "only in America."
Re:We are held to different standards? (Score:2, Informative)
You think Thor was a carpenter?
Hammers existed for many, many years as tools of war and knocking things apart before they were put to use as tools of peace and knocking things together.
Current carpenter's hammers are derived directly from the medieval war hammers designed to cuncuss with one end and pierce armor with the other and one of my autobody hammers is an almost exact duplicate of one version (it's a little smaller and the pick end isn't quite as sharp).
KFG
Re:cleaner than a politician's past (Score:3, Informative)
Merkey is from Utah, where this suit was filed, and it directly stems from the SCO fiasco. At the same time SCO was suing IBM for their little code dealio this guy Merkey comes out from nowhere an offers to pay $50,000 (or maybe it was $500,000, can't remember) to buy a fork of the linux kernel for private use by some indian tribe somewhere. The story was fishy to many in the OSS community, including especially the people he mentions in the lawsuit. Bruce Perens at one point said in a discussion something like "he should be shot" about Merkey. Pamela Jones also got into the ordeal. Apparently someone managed to trace Merkey's ties back to SCO and it seemed apparent that Merkey's offer was part of some SCO plot to undermine the linux community somehow.
Anyway, the OSS community were a little pissed by this whole thing and a lot of things were said and now this guy Merkey is using his special status as a Native American to sue everyone under the sun. The ties between GPL software and terrorism are just hilarious.
I get to tell my friends now that I help support international terrorism in Utah.
how to block archive.org from archiving your sites (Score:2, Informative)