[tweak2live]

The question of intellectual property is moot. It is impossible to adequately police teh intertubes without outlawing encryption.

Why do the media companies insist on continuing to attempt the impossible, instead of cutting their losses and investing in distribution infrastructure? By pursuing the kind of ham-fisted, extra-legal "piracy fighting" that the article describes, they are doing themselves a huge disservice. Strong-arming internet users, interfering with judicial processes, and pushing unpopular bills doesn't do a whole lot to stop piracy, but it does promote the view of the media industry as a mafia.

"The minister (illegally) told the prosecutor what had happened which forced him to raid TPB -- only a few weeks after sending out that memo about how legal it was." [Article]

Every time something like this happens, more people who in-principle support the idea of intellectual property become hostile towards media lobbies and companies they represent. Instead of trying to win the "hearts and minds" of internet users, they are turning "convenience pirates" ideological and legitimizing the very fears that push internet rights-activists in the same camp as the "ideological pirates".

[Gotttzsche]

i may be out of the loop, but... none of the popular ways of piracy are generally encrypted are they? if all the unencrypted ones were to be shut down, would it be possible to replace them with safe ones?

i mean with public p2p filesharing, you can always "spy" on the sharers. i mean it has the be decryptable for you to download it, right? and youll know who sent it.

and with stuff that hosted somewhere, whether it's some usenet provider or megaupload, you can always shut down the hoster.

people could still pirate by directly sending each other encrypted files, but you'd always have to know someone personally who has what you want. which would make piracy much harder.

why am i wrong? ;)

[chimeracoder]

Just because it's not the dominant means of exchange today doesn't mean it couldn't be.

Ten years ago, the analogous reasoning would have been 'Well, we can just shut down the Napster server', or shortly after 'Well, we can just shutdown the Gnutella superpeers'.

[Gotttzsche]

you ignored the problem i saw with it. if there's no public component to it and people would only share with their friends, the availability of piracy would be severely limited.

and if there is, the content industry could still get their "spies" in.

[kiba]

They seeks to maximize profit, not become the best distributor on the planet.