Filesonic Removes Ability To Share Files 412
Ihmhi writes "In the wake of the Megaupload takedown, Filesonic has elected to take preventative measures against a similar fate. The front page and all files now carry the following message: 'All sharing functionality on FileSonic is now disabled. Our service can only be used to upload and retrieve files that you have uploaded personally.' Whether or not this will actually deter the U.S. government from taking action remains to be seen."
Correction for the title. (Score:5, Insightful)
Filesonic becomes useless.
Re:Correction for the title. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Pretty sure you could do that without an account. So what were you doing with one?
Supporting a business which offers a service you appreciate, and wish to continue using? I did the same thing with Spotify before the Facebook tie-in, and a few other "Free" sites which offered a great service.
Re:Correction for the title. (Score:5, Informative)
The discussion was about sending files to a recipient which were too large to attach to email. Anything to say that is on-topic?
Re:Correction for the title. (Score:5, Interesting)
>Filesonic becomes useless.
Internet within US jurisdiction becomes a little more useless.
FTFY
You know that piracy isn't bothered by what the US does to it's own Internet businesses, right?
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>>>You know that piracy isn't bothered by what the US does to it's own Internet businesses, right?
You know that U.S. juris diction applies to almost the entire world, right? The megaupload persons were all foreigners on foreign land, but still landed in jail.
Re:Correction for the title. (Score:5, Informative)
This hunting file-sharers is meaningless, they will just switch over to encryption and other distributed forms of transfer like i2p2.de for example. Encrypted anonymizer written in Java so it runs on all platforms.
The side-effect is that real criminals will also benefit from this development and use the same means to communicate. Great, the pirate hunt will make it impossible to catch real terrorists. Is this really worth it?
Re:Correction for the title. (Score:5, Insightful)
It's worse than that, attacks on file sharing actually outright aid criminals in other ways too.
If people can't download films and music on the internet anymore, they aren't going to go to their local HMV or whatever and pay £14 for a CD, then some will just get copies from their friends, but others will just go down the local market and pay £3 to a dodgy dealer like people used to before the internet. This genuinely, directly puts money into the hands of organised crime- some of which is tied back to terrorism (both Taliban/al Qaeda sympathisers, and the Tamil Tigers got a lot of funding doing this sort of thing in the UK and other Western countries), rather than the bunk claims that file sharing somehow profits organised crime.
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It screws legitimate artists too. For most bands the biggest problem is getting heard in the first place, because if no-one knows about you then you are not going to sell many CDs or get many people come to your gigs. Cyberlocker websites were ideal for distributing music legally. Sure there is Bittorrent but it needs client software, megaupload.com just needs a browser.
So the music labels are doing a good job of clawing back ownership of distribution and marketing channels.
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There have been entire new genres and musical movements that only ever got anywhere because of "piracy". There are a number of highly visible and very wealthy "artists" that owe their current net worth to various forms of "piracy".
Yes. Obscurity is far more harmful to an artist even if the artist in question forgets this fact once they become non-obscure.
Re:Correction for the title. (Score:4, Informative)
"So what you're saying is, piracy funds terrorism."
Physical piracy yes.
"That sounds like a great reason to stop piracy don't you think?"
It's a great reason to stop physical piracy yes, but as you can't beat it with law enforcement and legislation as decades of failed attempt to do so have shown, then the only solution to date that's decreased physical piracy of content is digital piracy, then legislating against digital piracy actually works counter to stopping funding for terrorism from physical piracy.
Yes, I know you're too caught up in your own simplistic world view to get this, because you demonstrated in your post that you completely and utterly missed the point, which is also why you posted AC because you didn't want people linking your lack of ability to talk rationally about such a topic with your comments elsewhere where you may or may not have a clue what you're on about, but I figured it's worth clarifying anyway in case anyone else needed it explaining.
Still, have fun calling pirates stupid whilst simultaneously demonstrating a complete inability to follow what is frankly a quite simple argument to understand- any pirates reading this will at least be quite amused by the irony of that I imagine, so no doubt they'll thank you for that at least.
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Well of course, if you want to be that pedantic you could just nuke every human off the planet, then there'd be no piracy, but let's be honest, there reaches a point where the cost of solving a problem outweighs the benefits, and that's the problem with fighting piracy - it's too large scale a problem for any solution that involves aggression against pirates to be cost effective.
For digital piracy you can increase internet monitoring which ups the cost for ISPs and consumers, and makes internet connections
Re:Correction for the title. (Score:4, Informative)
Paying for piracy does, in the same way that moonshine funded the mob back during prohibition.
You know what the solution was there though? It wasn't to make alchohol even more regulated - it was to legalize it. Once their funding source is cut off, the mob lost the vast majority of any power it had.
Leave the internet alone and piracy quickly becomes a no-money-involved activity, and as such can't be used to fund a damned thing.
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You are kidding right? I'm the only person I ever met who morally cared about "stealing content." That was way back when I was young and naive. Everyone else I knew were passing around floppies or trying to hook two VCRs together to copy ET: The Extra Terrestrial, or making mix tapes off the radio for their friends.
Heck, even people I know in the music/other creative businesses do this, nobody thinks its some big sin to copy files. Nobody cares.
Here's an anecdote: I know a guy with an external hard dri
Re:Correction for the title. (Score:5, Informative)
Ah yes, [Citation needed], AKA, "I'm far too lazy to check the facts, but I'm going to disagree with you regardless, because I prefer to wallow in my own ignorance."
What are you disputing exactly? Here, have a bunch of links, not that I expect you to read them if you can't even be arsed to use Google to confirm a point:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/3074669.stm [bbc.co.uk]
http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=NsJGLW_hX3IC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Film+piracy,+organized+crime,+and+terrorism&hl=en&sa=X&ei=P3QdT6CWNsvOsgbIm9xI&ved=0CDYQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=Film%20piracy%2C%20organized%20crime%2C%20and%20terrorism&f=false [google.co.uk]
http://cryptome.org/ltte-vigil.htm [cryptome.org]
There's plenty more sources out there, it's a pretty well researched area. I'm not sure what exactly you're disputing, because you just posted a meaningless one liner, but terrorist groups of all shapes and sizes have long used counterfeit goods as a source of funding, as has organised crime. If you're not disputing that I can only assume you're disputing that these groups act in the UK, and if it's that you're disputing I can only ask, where have you been for the last few decades? There's been many cases of individuals linked to terrorism being guilty of financing terrorism in the UK- and they're only the ones the police have detected and been able to build enough evidence for a criminal case against. You only have to look at my 3rd link to see the scale of the Tamil operations in the UK to see that they absolutely are operating here.
Honestly, I'm all for defending digital piracy, but let's please not try and blur it all in together and hide the ugly facts of physical piracy. Read my other post in response to the AC that replied to me - I made it quite clear that I actually see digital piracy as the cure to physical piracy which genuinely does fund terrorism and organised crime.
If people are going to start lumping physical piracy in with digital piracy and argue that piracy is fine, then the battle is already lost, because those defending piracy really are genuinely being irrational at that point, and the MPAA really can bill them as terrorist sympathisers. That's not right, because digital piracy is a separate issue, with separate knock on effects - the effects of digital diracy are IMO harmless, and potentially even beneficial (increased access to knowledge, no evidence of decreased profits as a result), whilst the effects of physical piracy are quite problematic (funding of organised crime etc.). As I say, the former can actually act as a market that counters the latter, which means digital piracy likely actually decreases funding for terrorism and organised crime because people are no longer buying counterfeit content when they can download it at home. They will though, if that option is taken away.
Encryption in US is safe (Score:5, Informative)
In the US, forcing someone to give up encryption codes is generally considered to run afoul of the self-incrimination principle. So once the police ask someone for their codes, which they can do, they lose the ability to convict that person for what they find. So, given the prevailing legal opinion on the matter, and giving the fact that most congressmen and senators are either lawyers or judges or other parts of the legal system, I doubt this will come to pass. Even if it does, the US has precedent, and the self-incrimination thing is established by precedent and is part of the constitution, so it's unlikely judges would play ball.
Add to that that it's not necessary. You can "bait" p2p networks. At some point, no matter the encryption or routing tricks, you have to tell someone you don't know about the content you want. It is prohibitively expensive not to use direct routing once you get past a certain file size (so while tor is useful for downloading hacker texts, it's not useful for movie downloads). How do you know you're not asking an MPAA server ? You don't. 2 or 3 states consider that to be entrapment, but most don't, and that'll be enough.
Of course, most other regions like Europe or China don't consider the self-incrimination thing to be a problem at all. Nor do they consider forcing Americans in their jurisdictions to give up codes even the slightest bit objectionable (you don't have the right to private encryption anywhere in Europe, and let's just shut up about China and the rest).
Re:Encryption in US is safe (Score:5, Informative)
So, given the prevailing legal opinion on the matter, and giving the fact that most congressmen and senators are either lawyers or judges or other parts of the legal system, I doubt this will come to pass.
You are making the mistake of assuming that because most of congress and the senate is made up of lawyers that they have any problem whatsoever doing something vastly illegal.
The politicians have broken laws and even the fundamental founding principles of our nation in some fashion nearly every year since this country began. (The earliest I can think of is the suspension of habeas corpus in the Civil War.)
Re:Encryption in US is safe (Score:5, Informative)
(The earliest I can think of is the suspension of habeas corpus in the Civil War.)
The earliest prominent example was 1798, with the Sedition Act [wikisource.org]. Set to expire the day before John Adams left office, it was used by Federalists to punish journalists and even a Congressman who wrote mean things about the Federalist government.
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It is prohibitively expensive not to use direct routing once you get past a certain file size
But that "certain" file size is a moving target. Okay with my 60 Mbps fiber line I can get 5-6 MB/s over BitTorrent and maybe 1-200 kB/s with indirect routing, but it's still as fast as my 1 Mbps ADSL line was 10 years ago. True you won't be sharing BluRays that way - yet - but at full 24x7 download I'd probably manage to suck 30GB/month down that straw.
Of course, most other regions like Europe or China don't consider the self-incrimination thing to be a problem at all.
Don't smear all of Europe for the UKs RIP privacy act, the biggest lapdog of the US is the one that's gone furthest to absolish protections against self-inc
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And most obvious weak spots, like say the US electricity grid, have proven near 100% impervious for a decade now.
There's no point in terrorizing the US electricity grid, when the power companies seem perfectly [wikipedia.org] capable [wikipedia.org] of wrecking [wikipedia.org] it on their own [wikipedia.org].
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And most obvious weak spots, like say the US electricity grid, have proven near 100% impervious for a decade now.
How is that a huge weak spot? We had a big hurricane here in Norway some weeks back, many people lost power for quite some time. No big deal, and that was with far more massive damage than anything a few terrorists could manage. It's not terror having to use candles and flashlights. Even if the food in your fridge spoils and your cell phone runs out of battery you're not in mortal danger. The risk of quick and brutal death in a bombing works far better than trying to mass inconvenience people. Those who rea
Re:Correction for the title. (Score:5, Interesting)
I wanted to also point out that uploaded.to [uploaded.to] pretty much completely blocked the United States. Just my luck, I find out a half-hour after I submit the story.
The reaction of non-Americans (on Reddit [reddit.com], at least) seems to be "Ha, now you have to deal with the same shit we deal with from the BBC, Netflix, etc.".
Man, wouldn't it be just awesome if loads of websites in other countries blocked us? -.-
Re:Correction for the title. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Man, wouldn't it be just awesome if loads of websites in other countries blocked us? -.-
This is actually fairly likely. File hosters, and plenty of other sites targetable by inane legislations like SOPA/PIPA, are likely at some point to figure out that it costs them less to give up the US market entirely than to fight its legal system and possibly risk forced shutdown. I think Uploaded.to is just one of a long series of sites that'll do that.
This could go well, though. For starters, seeing the US shut out of increasingly large parts of the internet could serve as a warning for other countries
Re:Another correction for the title (Score:5, Insightful)
Copyright is a thing of the past. Information is freely shared by everyone. There is nothing that set a movie or a song apart in this regard.
As far as piracy is concerned, there is nothing anyone can do to stop it, short of shutting the internet down. If people have access to the internet, they will be able to communicate with everyone else that is on the internet. That's the definition of the internet.
People will also go undetected. That's the definition of encryption. You just set the key size to whatever suit your needs, and nobody will ever be able to decrypt it - unless they have the key.
Make encryption illegal and you kill e-commerce right there. Still make encryption illegal? Encryption can hide itself very easily: watermarking, hidden volumes, etc.
Nah. As long as people will be able to communicate, they will be able to pirate. Internet empowers everyone with almost unlimited (as far as songs and movies are concerned) communication. That comes with unlimited piracy. Sorry to disappoint you, but that's what the internet comes with.
Re:Another correction for the title (Score:5, Insightful)
The sooner we, as a society, recognize this, the sooner the next great leap in human civilization can occur. .
Next (Score:5, Funny)
US government requires written permission for moving files on your desktop.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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Huh?
When did things ever go away from torrents? Demonoid is still alive. Despite prior threats, TPB is still going strong. And the private tracker community has absolutely exploded over the past few years (though they'll leave your ass in the dust if you drop below a certain sharing ratio).
So what am I missing? Was there some global Megaupload revolution I wasn't aware of? Because all I've ever seen from lame ass websites like that was "OMG you exceeded your daily quota, give us money to continue! We promis
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Three years ago or more.
If you're looking for classical music and jazz, as well as .iso files (full DVDs) of films instead of low-quality transcoded files, Demonoid's selection is extremely poor compared to certain websites that link to Rapidshare et al.
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Now the interesting thing with that timeline is that it was directly influenced by the MPAA/RIAA's lawsuits - services such as MegaUpload effectively masked the identities of copyright infringers, shielding them from such suits. If this does swing back to BitTorrent, those infringers are going to once again become visible. Does this mean we'll see the RIAA/MPAA step up their civil lawsuits once more, since they'll be able to catch more peop
Re:Thigs swinging back to Bittorrent and P2P? (Score:5, Informative)
The problem with private trackers is just that - they're private.
Sure, they might be able to keep the MAFIAA out, but as it seems they had an insider at MegaUpload (they appear to have every internal mail going back to the start), nothing will prevent the same thing from happening everywhere else. So that protection only works as far as someone isn't corrupted by the MAFIAA.
The downside is two-fold:
1) Hard to get access. As you get accounts on more private trackers, it tends to be easier, but it's still not like just doing a general search and clicking on a link.
2) Lack of general access. The secondary purpose of any means to share files is the political side. Besides providing the data you want, they also need to make a statement through easy access to the data for everybody, thus massively undermining any and all attempts at stopping it. It must be a flood that makes it trivial to find and get whatever you're looking for, no matter what.
The Pirate Bay does just that. It's public, it's run by idealists, it's loud and in your face about file sharing. It makes sharing easy and access to the shared equally easy. Sure it provokes but that's just the idea! - It's all about saying to the media business that they were too late. Too little and too late. We still can't obtain a lot of the stuff shared legally. I want to watch the new Underworld movie tonight but I can't because it's not out in any form I can buy. They simply won't provide it even at a price. That's not what the world wants and if they won't sell it we have to steal it. We need to repeat this until they get it. We want access to it all - globally and simultaneously. I'm sure a lot of the so-called pirates are honest people at heart, but they're forcing us to become criminals. All these people will be happy to pay for the stuff if they were only able. I would as I want to support the production of stuff that I like. But so far they won't let me. So we need to push even harder and if necessary push them out of business if they continue to refuse common sense and basic business knowledge (supply and demand).
Re:Thigs swinging back to Bittorrent and P2P? (Score:5, Interesting)
Some time ago I contacted the RIAA to get permission to play music in public in a specific setting. I got sent off on a 6 week long wild goose chase with no-one able to tell me how to get permission and how much it would cost. The bears repeating: no one at RIAA or any of the labels could tell me how to get permission to play music in my setting.
What this means is that in spite of all their noise making, the *IAA is not set up to let people do what they want; they still want to control not only the distribution but also the who, when, and where. They just tell you that if you don't have permission, you can't play. But they don't have a mechanism, at any price, to let you play when and where you want.
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You were asking the wrong organization. ASCAP [ascap.com] (American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers) licenses playback of music in public places, at least in the U.S.A. The RIAA is more of a marketing/lobbying/lawsuit factory designed to fight for the interests of the publishers, very different goals. I probably shouldn't be surprised that no-one there sent you over to ASCAP, but I still have a naive hope that industry insiders would at least know the other heavy hitters in their own industry...
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For invading our basic human rights, for heinous acts of financial and criminal terrorism, for treasonous corruption of the government, for hate crimes against individuals and humanity at large, the Big Media corporations must all be destroyed. There is no truce. They are one of the enemies who's goals are absolutely exclusive with a free humanity.
Destroy them. They have been in the process of destroying you since before you were born.
The people behind them should be incarcerated for life. Their financial a
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If you look at the settings on Vuze you will find that this is already a normal thing to do.
Re:Thigs swinging back to Bittorrent and P2P? (Score:5, Informative)
Then you get Freenet. It's anonyminity is as good as it gets - it's designed for use by dissidents living under oppressive regimes, so tracing either source or destination is all but impossible even if someone could compromise many nodes. The cost of this is performance: You can download whole TV episodes and movies, but at a fraction of the speed of a less paranoid network.
Re:Thigs swinging back to Bittorrent and P2P? (Score:4)
Freenet is more than TOR + P2P. Freenet also stores the files in the network (each file is divided into redundant parts and distributed across all the machines running Freenet).
TOR + P2P is roughly equal to OneSwarm.
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BitTorrent makes many small data requests over different TCP connections to different machines
Re:Thigs swinging back to Bittorrent and P2P? (Score:5, Insightful)
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And it is exactly the sort of thing that makes nasty things like SOPA and the like get momentum.
SOPA gets momentum from those who corporate groups who lobby the government for it. Putting the blame on /. opinions is misdirection at best.
Re:Thigs swinging back to Bittorrent and P2P? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not a slashdot opinion - it's the idea that you can take something from someone else who spent some money producing it for sale, and instead get it for free. And then claiming it's somehow your right, or somehow noble to do it.
Re:Thigs swinging back to Bittorrent and P2P? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's no less arbitrary that those of us who create content (and I'm one of them) claim it's somehow our right to profit from it.
Take a look at this blog post by Jonathan Coulton. I can't think of any way I could agree more:
http://www.jonathancoulton.com/2012/01/21/megaupload/ [jonathancoulton.com]
Re:Thigs swinging back to Bittorrent and P2P? (Score:5, Insightful)
From your link:
[Tim O'Reilly] points out that he and a lot of other content creators have been happily coexisting with piracy all this time, and I’m certainly one of them. Make good stuff, then make it easy for people to buy it. There’s your anti-piracy plan. The big content companies are TERRIBLE at doing both of these things, so it’s no wonder they’re not doing so well in the current environment. And right now everyone’s fighting to control distribution channels, which is why I can’t watch Star Wars on Netflix or iTunes. It’s fine if you want to have that fight, but don’t yell and scream about how you’re losing business to piracy when your stuff isn’t even available in the box I have on top of my TV. A lot of us have figured out how to do this.
(Emphasis mine.)
Always knew he was a good guy.
Re:Thigs swinging back to Bittorrent and P2P? (Score:5, Interesting)
Seems to me that over the last 10yrs or so the MAFIAA have been very successfully in their campaign to convince people (including way too many slashdotters), that downloading is illegal. From a moral POV, I would really like to see the authorities take them to task over what amounts to a seriously fraudulent advertising campaign. A just punishment would be to fine them twice what they spent on the campaign and give it to a court appointed executor to spend on correcting the misinformation....one can dream, right?
Re:Thigs swinging back to Bittorrent and P2P? (Score:5, Informative)
AFAIK downloading (leech style) is not illegal in any western country
Well, I can't tell for other countries, but the law about that recently (2011-12-20) changed in France (if that's western enough for you).
For those interested and that can read French, it's article L122-5 [legifrance.gouv.fr] of Code de la propriété intellectuelle, modified by law 2011-1898. There is no decree for that law yet.
Before, the author couldn't oppose "copies or reproductions strictly reserved for private use". Now, the author can't oppose "copies or reproductions made from a lawful source and strictly reserved for private use".
This happened shortly after (2011-10-04) the Court of Justice of the European Union reaffirmed that the receiver was not infringing in a case about satellite video streaming. (I have not the source from the CJEU, but from a law firm [poulmairejacob.com] (in French)).
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AFAIK downloading (leech style) is not illegal in any western country, it's uploading that's the problem.
Yeah, you'd be wrong. Copyright infringement includes distribution - e.g. "uploading" as you note. However, it also includes copying - e.g. "downloading". Under US law, downloading material under copyright without permission is illegal.
That said, you're close... The RIAA/MPAA never go after downloaders because (a) if they also have a legitimate purchased copy, they can make a colorable argument for fair use format shifting; (b) unlike distributors, leechers can legitimately make the argument that damages f
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It's not a slashdot opinion - it's the idea that you can take something from someone else who spent some money producing it for sale, and instead get it for free. And then claiming it's somehow your right, or somehow noble to do it.
But you can. You can and you always will be able to. That's the problem with data and the internet - once you get your hands on data, you can share it. And invariably, you will.
And no, there is NOTHING anyone can do about it. It has ALWAYS been so, it's no news either. Back in the days however you could only transfer cheaply what your memory could contain. No real threat except for headline news which spread faster than the newspaper can be delivered. The internet gave us the means to transmit terabytes qui
Re:Thigs swinging back to Bittorrent and P2P? (Score:5, Insightful)
> Breaking the law simply because
For a law to be fair and just, it has to be accepted by a significant share of the population, i.e. it has to be democratically supported. When laws are simply forced from the top down by a few stake holders and then massively enforced against the population like in pre-democratic feudal middle ages, breaking a unjust law you can not democratically change is a fucking rebellion. A law does not automatically gain legitimacy just by being a "law", otherwise nobody would ever rebelled against feudalism. Feudalism also had "laws". Libya also had "laws" and you know how it ended. A law just being called a law means nothing.
A law gains legitimacy by the process how it is passed. It gains legitimacy by whether it is widely accepted as law. This crazy IP shit is neither. It was decided behind closed doors, by a few greedy sick fucks, and is then applied to millions with the sole intent to extract money from them and everybody knows this. Copyright in its todays form is as undemocratic and illegitimate as a law can get.
> help those of us who care about civil liberties fight against draconian laws
Come on, you fucking dont do anything. You dont attempt anything, you never ever accomplished anything. You know that you have no chance in hell to change this, so whats your plan? How are you gonna get big money out of and democracy into copyright legislation? How exactly do you "fight"?
> join us in our attempts to make copyright laws marginally sane
All you seemingly do is going around telling people not to break "the law", so basically youre part of the problem. You sound like big content, "dont break it, its the law, breaking it will make things worse for you". How is simply bowing down, obeying and not breaking an exploitive, undemocratic and unjust law going to automatically make the law more sane?
Re:Thigs swinging back to Bittorrent and P2P? (Score:5, Insightful)
...and the majority of us did not vote for the current USA laws, because we don't live in the USA
MegaUpload - a Hong Kong Based company, shut down by the USA, and the directors arrested in New Zealand ...for infringing on US copyright laws?!
Re:Thigs swinging back to Bittorrent and P2P? (Score:5, Informative)
> If every law were taken to a referendum then we'd still be living in the dark ages.
Switzerland has had direct democracy for the last 150 years and is certainly not in the dark ages, it is working rather well. Thanks for the insult.
They do not take every law to a referendum, but the key is that they _can_ if they want. They can and they often do veto crazy laws. The ability to legally stop crazy laws without having to resort to fighting, protesting, boycotting, begging politicians, i.e. how "democracy" is obviously understood in the US, is the key.
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Direct democracy does have its downsides too in Switzerland. For example it's much easier to pass restrictive immigration laws simply by fear mongering.
Other subjects are difficult to comprehend such as financial treaties or international cooperation. That's the reason why Switzerland joined the UN only in 2002.
Finally, there are some discussions that are always getting very emotional and don't allow for an objective evaluation. I'm thinking of preventive custody for sexual crimes for example. It's very eas
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The US is a republic because pure democracy is a chaotic mistake, for the simple fact that The People, by and large, are idiots. As such, these laws are "democratically supported" because those who pass them were democratically elected. If you want different laws, elect different lawmakers or STFU.
One suggestion. If you want to complain about the problems with democracies and bring up the virtues of republics, then I highly recommend that you don't mention the US, as it basically is the poster child of what is wrong with the idea of republics.
Re:Thigs swinging back to Bittorrent and P2P? (Score:5, Insightful)
This sort of comment is part of the problem, not the solution. Breaking the law simply because one isn't going go through the effort to pay for something optional like music is not helpful. It isn't noble.
When you have a political system as unbelievably corrupt as the one in Washington D.C. right now, which passes laws for the copyright cartel to extend copyright indefinitely, I have to say that I think civil disobedience against copyright law is justified. The average citizen has NO power to do a damn thing about the law, and nowhere near enough money to buy their politicians back (not that that's how it should work).
It's all very well saying you should reform copyright the legal way, but be realistic: when is that going to happen? Is that ever going to happen? In the meantime, why should people put up with a law that the majority would disagree with if they really knew much about it and which we think is utterly unjustifiable, and a complete perversion of copyright's original intention?
Re:Thigs swinging back to Bittorrent and P2P? (Score:4, Insightful)
1. Everyone stops pirating - they stop bribing politicians because there is no longer a need.
2. Everyone pirates - they lose all of their revenue and eventually die.
Personally I prefer the 2nd option.
Re:Thigs swinging back to Bittorrent and P2P? (Score:4, Insightful)
I'd rather option 2. I'm quite willing to sacrifice the big-budget movie if that is what it takes to defend free speech and access to unrestricted computing technology.
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Breaking the law simply because one isn't going go through the effort to pay for something optional like music is not helpful.
It is, if you seed.
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It's not all about illegal downloading.
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It's a fairly inevitable back and forth development, as the increasing popularity of BitTorrent gives investigators an incentive to track and drives up the risk, after which streaming sites become more popular, leading to take-down efforts targeted at those, making people go back to BitTorrent again.
It's a question of risk evaluation. BitTorrent almost always works, but leaves you personally open for legal attacks. Streaming sites can be used with relative anonymity but go down easily.
Re:Thigs swinging back to Bittorrent and P2P? (Score:4, Insightful)
Seeding is becoming incredibly dangerous in countries where the US has too much influence - take a look, for example, at New Zealand's Copyright (Infringing File Sharing) Amendment Act 2008. A law pretty much written by the US Government (read MPAA and RIAA) which essentially makes it so that once the relevant sections kick in, Warner Music or Disney can get you banned from the internet for six months because they claim to have detected you uploading files over Bittorrent - and the burden of proof is on you, the defendant, not them the accuser. And we both know that the reason the US government pushes laws like this overseas is so that they can weaken the domestic opposition. So while you say "please seed", some people are simply not in a position to.
Screw Paying Customers (Score:4, Interesting)
MediaFire (Score:3)
MediaFire doesn't have such a paid affiliate program AFAIK; they seem less guilty of obnoxious behavior in general.
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Two down... (Score:5, Informative)
Megaupload is being taken for a ride in the Party Van and Filesonic has chosen self obliteration, though there is no shortage of competing services. On first glance Wikipedia lists 70+ [wikipedia.org] of the most popular file hosting services.
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What is heroic about breaking one of their primary functions?
Admittedly I haven't used filesonic, however I have shared large files on MegaUpload (and no, they weren't files controlled by any media cartels) with the primary purpose of allowing someone other than myself to download them.
ISPs don't like you running your own servers without paying 4 times as much for 1/4 of the speed (I used to go that route...) and you can't email someone a 600MB file, so it's really handy to have services like this.
If they w
Local DC++ hubs, magnet and torrent trackers (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Local DC++ hubs, magnet and torrent trackers (Score:4, Insightful)
Same in Romania. We also already enjoyed fiber to the door years ago. Whatever film you wanted to watch some evening, you could download it in just a couple of minutes. It was this experience especially that really made me feel that the US had lost its edge in tech. Before emigrating to Eastern Europe, I was living in a major US metropolitan area but stuck with bad cable or DSL options that throttled the hell out of connections, as well as the fear of P2P lawsuits.
In thousands of basements (Score:2)
Self-Censorship (Score:2)
Jacob Appelbaum spoke about self-censorship at his keynote at LCA2012.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GMN2360LM_U [youtube.com]
In this case, its a company choosing to censor themselves so the government doesnt have to.
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Self-censorship isn't an acceptable alternative to no censorship at all.
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Which was Jacob's point; where there is surveillance, there will be censorship, even if it is not explicit. He called it "an emergent phenomenon of surveillance". Hence the importance of resistance to surveillance.
A message from America... (Score:5, Interesting)
...to the rest of the world: we don't want your business. We don't want any tech companies to set up here. We're going to make this the most hostile nation to internet and technology start ups by bullying anyone who dares defy our notion of imaginary property.
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We don't want your business. We don't want any tech companies to set up here.
I applaud your sentiment since SOPA/PIPA etc. are stupid. But your comment is not reflective of reality. Google is based in the USA. So is Apple. So is Intel. So is Cisco. So is Facebook. So is Microsoft. So is Oracle. So is Red Hat. So is Qualcomm. So is Yahoo!. The list goes on and on.
There are a lot of good arguments against the current US Intellectual Property/patent policies, but "tech companies won't exist in the US" is not one of them.
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Internet and technology startups rely on intellectual property rights. If you just invented a new widget, you'd much rather do business in the US (with all its flaws) than in some anarcho-libertarian utopia with no intellectual property rights, because in that "utopia" some big megacorp would just come along, take your idea, and mass produce it at a lower price than you can afford to compete at. Thanks for all your hard work, now get back in the unemployment line.
The only thing that makes less sense than
next up: pastebin, scribd, youtube, tubestack (Score:3)
and all the other sites that are just massive abuses of the 'good faith' idea.
its one thing to be a neutral admin. but lets compare youtube and wikipedia for a moment.
on wikipedia, if you see copyright violations, you can take them down yourself. or, you can report them to a specialized group on wiki that actually cares about removing copyrighted content that was uploaded without permission of the copyright holder. they also have a system to verify whether or not works have been granted permission, and whether they are in public domain, by a large amount of research done with licensing and legal systems around the world.
now, lets take youtube. its full of people just uploading music albums and putting a still photo as their 'video'. now, the only person who can ever report that as a copyright vio is the artist themselves. nevermind you could probably listen to their music for free on bandcamp or something. . . youtube is not going to provide a link to bandcamp. youtube just does not give a shit.
Re:next up: pastebin, scribd, youtube, tubestack (Score:4, Interesting)
Youtube also has checks in place to figure out whether the soundtrack matches a copyrighted one. Of course, it's relatively easy to fool (change tone a bit or alter the soundtrack just a tiny fraction), but unaltered songs get automatically silenced. I know because I tried uploading a World of Tanks Clan Parade video I made which had "Diesel Power" by Prodigy as soundtrack. As soon as the upload finished, I received a notification that the soundtrack was copyrighted and bang, movie with no sound.
Interestingly, the same algorythm they use made me stop uploading Audiosurf captures; Audiosurf is a game allowing you to "race" a track uniquely generated from a song you choose. After ending up with a few nice captures which were muted, I said screw it and stopped.
Lan Parties (Score:2)
Boo hoo (Score:3)
FileSonic was one of the hosts most beloved by for-profit autoposters, who spam links everywhere they can to rack up rewards payouts for lots of downloads, all while ignoring forum rules and drowning out people who actually want to share with other community members.
I'm not sad to see some of the for-profit whores exit the file sharing scene. Good riddance.
Made it difficult (Score:4, Insightful)
Here in Australia, there is only one main source of multimedia online - iTunes. And it has a limited selection compared to the US version, and massive markups. What costs you guys 99c-$1.69 costs us $1.69-$2.19 (AUD and USD are practically at parity)
Amazon doesn't work outside the US.
Google Music doesn't work outside the US.
Zune only started in Australia recently - but there are DRM restrictions.
Also, with TV episodes, there is a large delay between US availability and AU availability. At least months difference, and it is still overpriced and DRM locked on iTunes. We can't access iTunes US without a credit card. We aren't allowed to pay for it basically. So what is the easier option? Just download it.
Another common example among friends of mine:
We all love k-pop. But we can't get Korean music in Australian music stores. We can't buy it online from iTunes. We can't set up an account for iTunes Korea. We can't order the CDs online either. So what is the obvious solution? Download it.
As long as the Music/TV/Movie industry make it extremely difficult to pay, there will be a large amount of people who pirate around the world because they aren't given the option to pay for it easily. However if paying for music was easier than downloading, there would be more people paying for music.
Re:Obvious (Score:5, Informative)
Why would anyone ever have to "share" backup files with anyone else.
Because it was really useful for collaborative projects.
Not only that... (Score:4, Insightful)
Why would anyone ever have to "share" backup files with anyone else.
Because it was really useful for collaborative projects.
Because it is my freedom to do what the hell I want with *my* files, including backup files.
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Re:Not only that... (Score:5, Interesting)
The concept of liberty is so 1790s.
Re:Obvious (Score:5, Interesting)
Because the owners of these sites are only punishable under US law so long as they're doing business here and they are in a country that extradites to the US. The moment someone sets up an operation like this in a US-unfriendly country (and makes absolutely sure not to conduct any business in the US), there will be no way for the US to shut them down by going after the owners.
Thus SOPA. You can't shut the site down, but if you can prevent them from engaging in transactions with US residents, you've effectively achieved the same thing.
Re:Obvious (Score:5, Insightful)
This is nonsense. "Personal backups" are by no means the only legitimate use of services such as this. As a freelance developer, I've had several clients use services like this to send me files. Is your imagination really so limited that you can't think of a single reason why you might want to share a file you have the rights to with another person?
File sharing is not intrinsically illegal. File sharing is fundamental to the Internet. Right now, Slashdot is sharing many, many files with people accessing it, including you. Are you a criminal? Copyright infringement is a particular type of file sharing. The two concepts are not synonymous, they are quite distinct.
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>Can you access your FTP server in a plane? On a boat? On a train?
When could you not?
Do you seriously think the entire Internet is port 80?
--
BMO
Re:Obvious (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Obvious (Score:5, Interesting)
If this type of service was only meant for personal backups and not illegal file sharing, this would have been the standard in the first place.
Why would anyone ever have to "share" backup files with anyone else.
You're making a strawman argument. No where does it say on that site that it's for making backups.
I assume they're only making the files available to the original uploaders (so that no one can come and later claim that they've lost important files because of them). You know how people are. If gmail were to suddenly shut down tomorrow and allow no one to retrieve anything from their account. 100% of all gmail users would claim that they had lost irreplaceable files and data on it (even if they hadn't).
...and this facade (of legal file sharing) will be completely stopped...
Sure, the facade of illegal file sharing may shut down, but at the cost of the legal file sharing as well. I don't know about you, but for me if everyone of those filesharing sites shuts down, that means I'm relegated to using gmail for sharing files (and that usually means a limit of 5 MB to 25 MB depending on who I'm emailing the attachment to). Either that, or I can use meetup.com site which has a limit of 10 MB (plus I think they manually inspects each upload, even for paid customers, so that means there is a delay there as well before anything actually shows up).
If these sites can be shut down with lawsuits now, why do we need SOPA and PIPA?
Like I said, I hope this doesn't shut down all file-sharing web sites, which would make my life difficult, but I think that was the original point of SOPA and PIPA, and that was to eventually shut down without due process any and all user file-sharing web sites that are easy to use (no matter what collateral damage this would create on the legitimate and legal usage that goes on there).
Re:Obvious (Score:5, Informative)
Github (Score:4, Insightful)
Github's public repositories can of course be used for illegal file sharing, and some infringing material probably exists right now, because it is impractical for the site operator to monitor all uploaded data. However, without such functionality, participating in (or even just forking) an open source project will be much more cumbersome.
Well, an hour spent writing open-source (or other) software is an hour not consuming MAFIAA's stuff, so maybe this is what they actually want...
Re:Obvious (Score:5, Interesting)
We don't need SOPA and PIPA as currently written, but we need something.
Do we? [forbes.com]
Alternative SOPA (Score:5, Insightful)
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The best thing about SOPA and PIPA is that now people all over the world are seeing how dangerous it is to rely on the US for important services. We are switching to DNS servers that cannot be regulated by absurd US law suits. The internet is changing to an US and us internet whereby we can see things you cannot. The Great Firewall of the USA is being built and good luck to those in the US that are letting it happen. The idea is just as idiotic as the Chinese version and less workable.
Re:Sooo... (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, even Dropbox and SpiderOak have "sharing" support on their free offerings (at least, assuming they don't follow this lead themselves).
Re:E-mail? (Score:4, Insightful)
Ever emailed yourself a 600+MB file?
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Re: (Score:2)
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Hmm, does it let you update your billing information?
Try making the credit card number all 0's or just replacing some of the digits randomly. The charge will fail to go through.