Interview With Suren Ter From 'You Have Downloaded' 366
An anonymous reader writes "Suren Ter discusses privacy, piracy, and the future of filesharing. Suren produced the virally popular YouHaveDownloaded.com, which displays all downloads on the public BitTorrent network associated with an IP address."
When asked about his views on piracy: "Just like I told a French journalist and to the lady at the Washington Post, pirates are thieves and they do steal. Yeah yeah, 'when I steal your DVD, you have no DVD, but when I copy a file, you still have a file' — I get that BS. We all know that it’s BS too. However, SOPAs and PIPAs create tyranny. If given the choice between thieves and tyranny, I’d rather stay with the thieves."
The site is a joke - the authors say it themselves (Score:5, Informative)
"Don't take it seriously The privacy policy, the contact us page — it’s all a joke. We came up with the idea of building a crawler like this and keeping the maintenance price under $300 a month. There was only one way to prove our theory worked — to implement it in practice. So we did. Now, we find ourselves with a big crawler. We knew what it did but we didn’t know how to use it. So we decided to make a joke out of it. That’s the beauty of jokes — you can make them out of anything."
Re:Right, because BS is a thorough refutation (Score:5, Informative)
The GPL grants rights to everyone. Copyright takes rights away from everyone. That's the difference. The GPL currently relies on copyright as a legal hack to ensure those rights, but really those rights should be part of consumer protection laws, and copyright should be done away with entirely.
Re:Right, because BS is a thorough refutation (Score:2, Informative)
As a more realistic example, and one that currently exists, would be the object model files for 3D printers (see Thingiverse). Here, the creator of the object model file owns the copyright to that file and can license it under whatever license they choose. The object printer would own whatever object was actually printed as they own the printer and the plastic media that was used to perform the printing.
In your example, I would guess that the replicator owner owns the corn that was replicated, but the corn model file would be owned and licensed separately.
Re:I can't wait to start moderating (Score:5, Informative)
> You can argue semantics all you want, but the base argument
> is very simple and straight forward: Should you be allowed to
> take another person's efforts and do whatever you want with
> them?
Sure. The progress of all of human history would not exist otherwise. Even much celebrated "innovators" and "inventors" stood on the shoulders of others.
Copyright exists to serve the public good. It was never meant to be a form of property.
Re:Right, because BS is a thorough refutation (Score:4, Informative)
The only ability (definitely not rights) that are restricted by the GPL is the ability to remove the rights of your end users. That's like saying laws against assault remove your right to punch people in the face. Technically true, but most people value the right to be free from face punching more.