[runningdogx]

Hint to law enforcement:

It doesn't matter whether copyright infringement is ethically good or bad. It doesn't matter whether these sites are legally liable for copyright infringement that goes on using them.

You look like complete morons trying to take down site after site. You are pissing people off and what do you have to show for it except a few hollow victories?

If copyright infringement through file sharing has decreased, it's due to itunes, amazon, google, and all the smaller companies offering digital versions of content. Guess who is missing from that list? MPAA and RIAA members.

Trying to fight copyright infringement through punitive fines or throwing people in prison is sick. It's like the drug war, only worse. At least you can point to a few crazy meth heads as a danger to the public. "Pirates" hurt... the meatspace content distributors that are rapidly becoming obsolete?

[dagw]

Law enforcement don't have free hands to decide what laws they enforce. There are a good half dozen layers above them kicking downwards screaming "Shut down TPB", until it ends up in the lap of some poor slob who then has to actually go out and physically perform a pointless raid or lose his job. I'm sure that guy (and even his boss, and probably also his boss's boss) don't want to waste their time and resources with these raids, and would much rather go after real crimes. If you want to fix the problem focus on the political and ministerial layer, not the law enforcement layer.

[lkrubner]

> Law enforcement don't have free hands > to decide what laws they enforce.

Law enforcement doesn't have enough free hands to go after every crime, therefore which crimes are pursued is always a choice. Resources are finite, therefore the decision to commit law enforcement agents to copyright infringement is also, at the same time, a decision to NOT commit law enforcement agents to pursuing trading violations on Wall Street, or income tax evasion among the rich.

In other words, with resources being finite, every decision about what to pursue is at least partially a political calculation. Ideally, that calculation may be based on social utility (in Jeremy Bentham's formulation "the greatest good for the greatest number") or, that calculation may be based on some corrupt influence of various political factions.

People like myself, who question the usefulness of these raids, are trying to raise the question "Is this the best use of our taxpayer dollars?" Given that trading on Wall Street recently contributed to the onset of the worst economic crisis since the 1930s, I would say the case for stronger enforcement of trading regulations would prove more useful than further attempts to surpress copyright infringement.

[jlarocco]

> Law enforcement doesn't have enough free hands to go after every crime, therefore which crimes are pursued is always a choice.

Misses the point. It's somebody's choice, but it's not always the law enforcement agency's choice. If the FBI director's boss tells him to raid TPB, his choices are "do the raid" or "get fired."

I would guess it's more satisfying to go after real criminals, but they have to follow their orders.

[tripzilch]

The FBI?? You realize this is taking place in Sweden right?

Fucking hell, talk about America world police :(

[dagw]

Do you really think Swedish law enforcement works so completely differently that the comparison is invalid?

[rmc]

Law enforcement don't have free hands to decide what laws they enforce

Sure they do.

In some countries (e.g. UK) the prosecution service (e.g. Crown Prosecution Service) only bring a crime to court if it's "in the public interest" (cf. http://www.cps.gov.uk/publications/code_for_crown_prosecutor... ). Ireland has similar laws ( http://www.dppireland.ie/brief-guide-to-the-criminal-justice... )

Although this applied to the actuall criminal prosecution, not the police enforcement.

[spindritf]

> In some countries (e.g. UK) the prosecution service

Which is several layers above the poor bobby actually carrying out the raid. It's more of an illustration to dagw's post than a counterargument.

[jiggy2011]

That's just standard separation of concerns, expecting individual police officers to make judgments about each case would make law enforcement very inconsistent.

People who are skilled at making arrests and beating down doors are not necessarily also skilled in analyzing data and crime statistics in order to decide which cases to persue.

[obtu]

Prosecution seems to be politicised, and pursue cases according to who controls the executive branch rather than according to the interests of the general public. I'd like to know which countries have taken steps to make prosecution more independent, and how they did it.

[yabai]

Indeed law enforcement does not have free hands to decide what laws to enforce. They are being puppeted by big business and government pressure. This issue is less about the law, and more about big business pressuring everyone and their momma to protect their business interests.

I have always thought about The Pirate Bay like a gun shop in the US. Gun shops sell guns and ammo...they help facilitate killing human beings...but we never hold the gun shop responsibile (so long as they comply with licensing laws etc). Why dont we look at The Pirate Bay in the same way? They supply a tool that can be used for wrong doing. It can also be used legitimately (as in the case of guns).

How is this arguement so different?

[danssig]

If countless millions of people were buying guns at one gun shop and killing people continuously, of course cops would ignore the actual killers and go after the gun shop.

[lukeschlather]

The gun shop analogy is totally flawed. It's more like a newsletter about how to get away with murder. Except instead of a newsletter it's a website. And instead of murder it's copying things and giving them away for free.

[ktizo]

If that were true, then surely the UK would have been shut down years ago.

[toyg]

Law enforcement does have a choice, because their resources are finite. The cynic in me would say that, when choosing between having to deal with dangerous criminals or raiding a bunch of white-collar nerds, it's easy to see which one is the most appealing. Servers don't shoot back.

[ktizo]

In normal policing they do, it is a daily part of their job and is known as 'police discretion'.

http://rynardlaw.com/Article6.aspx

[paulhauggis]

Nobody gets this outraged when companies that violate the GNU license get taken to court and you can use the exact same reasoning as the pirates (When you use open source in a proprietary app, the original is still in tact. The only thing we don't get are the changes, so nobody really gets hurt).

[rickmb]

People get outraged at the abuse of copyright by corporations against the common good.

Whether that abuse comes in the form of violating copyright or protecting copyright is irrelevant. Copyright isn't the ethical issue here. The abuse is.

[tikhonj]

Just because both the GPL and the media industry both rely on copyright does not make them equivalent. If anything, it's exactly the opposite--a company not complying with the GPL is making information inaccessible to the public; a company enforcing normal copyright is also making information inaccessible.

The GPL is basically an inversion of standard copyright: where copyright is normally used to restrict access, the GPL ensures access. So it's pretty easy to see how not complying with the GPL is similar to aggressively pursuing piracy or using horrible DRM.

[mikeash]

Nobody goes to jail due to GPL violations. If the police were conducting raids, seizing servers, and throwing people in jail for years for GPL violations and people still weren't outraged, then it might be time to talk about a double standard.

[cynicalkane]

What would that even look like? GPL code can't be mass pirated by an army of private users, as with TPB--because it's free. And if some major players stole GPL code for commercial use, that would be remedied with a lawsuit, if at all.

[mikeash]

Indeed. A company commits mass GPL infringement (e.g. shipping GPL code to a million customers without following the terms of the license) and it gets settled with, at most, a minor lawsuit. A different company helps its users commit mass copyright infringement (linking to torrents) and its servers get raided and its officers sent to jail.

[pyre]

I might find your argument somewhat valid if RMS was able to pressure the Swedes to execute a raid against a proprietary software company, and send people off to serve prison sentences.

  > When you use open source in a proprietary app,
  > the original is still in tact

One thing that you're completely missing here is that by including it in a proprietary app without attribution, you are implicitly claiming that the work is your own. When was the last time that a college student downloading an mp3 claimed that he was artist that created the track?

GPL violations and media piracy only share copyright as a common thread, but copyright isn't the entire picture.

[JonnieCache]

You are pissing people off and what do you have to show for it except a few hollow victories?

Budget increments. This is basically the beginning and the end of the story.

[cyberswat]

It's kind of like how they started a country to escape taxes and then gave themselves the power to arrest and imprison those that don't pay taxes ... everyone knows how wrong what is happening is and how much it makes them look like morons to normal people ... but they have deeper pockets and patient lawyers/politicians in those pockets that will span generations if necessary until they get their way. They try a big step, and when it doesn't work, they step back and break it up into smaller steps that get them to the eventual goal. It's obvious their lobbying power is something that defies logic because we were taught how things are "supposed" to work in school. I'm curious how heartfelt blasting (totally justified btw) of these larger organizations accomplishes anything. A moment of rage doesn't stop a river. I'm not sure what does.

[freehunter]

You have a few good points, but I'd like to correct the first one. America was not founded to escape taxes, it was founded (in part) because those taxes were coming from across the ocean and the money was going back across the ocean with no American voice being heard and no American benefit from being a colony.

[smokeyj]

Now we send our money to DC and never see it again.

[pinko]

"No taxation without representation" != "No taxation"

[corin_]

That does still leave Puerto Rico as a bit of an anomoly, though!

[eli]

Forget Puerto Rico -- Washington, DC pays taxes and yet has no meaningful Congressional representation and limited autonomy to pass its own laws.

[philwelch]

That's true. Now what do we do about it?

The option that gets the most traction is DC statehood, but understandably, the overwhelming force behind DC statehood is Democrats who want to automatically get another 2 Senators out of the deal. And the whole point of the District of Columbia was to keep the federal government neutral by not putting it in any state.

A more sensible alternative, which has less traction, is to reducing the District to merely encompass the core government buildings and ceding the rest to the state of Maryland, just as the parts of DC south of the Potomac were ceded to Virginia to form Arlington County. If this were done, Maryland would have to agree to it and the 23rd Amendment, which gives DC three electors in the Electoral College, would probably need to be repealed, or else the land surrounding the Capitol, White House, and Supreme Court buildings would have three electors. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_of_Columbia_retrocessi...

It's an important issue for sure, but it's a tough nut to crack and the notion of statehood means any resolution to the problem will have a direct partisan effect.

[eli]

The neutrality of the federal government is a nonissue. Federal buildings and parks are already outside city jurisdiction. They have their own police force and they pay no DC taxes. The founders certainly did not intend for 700,000 Americans to live without representation.

Retrocession is a neat idea aside from the fact that none of the people it would affect actually want it.

Statehood is the only option that makes sense. It is unfortunate that DC happens to have demographics that favor one party over the other only because it makes it hard to get things done. But it doesn't change the basic unfairness of the situation. It's not a partisan issue any more than women's suffrage is a partisan issue.

There was a decent plan a few years ago to give a voting member of the House and also granting an additional member to the next state in line based on census data (conveniently a heavily Republican district in Utah, I believe). Unfortunately it fell apart when Republicans added poison pill amendements to alter gun ownership and abortion laws in the District. It was also probably unconstitutional.

[ImprovedSilence]

But Puerto Rico has been given the chance to become a state, and they always vote it down. So it's not like they entirely don't have a say.

[drcube]

Don't forget children and felons.

[slug]

Don't forget legal non-citizen immigrants :)

[darasen]

There seems to be a confusion between the terms representation and voting rights.

[kamjam]

Totally agree. It's the old west trying to keep up with the world, it's only a matter of time before you are run over!

I have a question. Is copyright infringement (in the UK at least) a criminal offence or a matter for the civil courts?

[njs12345]

I think it depends whether it's done commercially or not. See http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1988/48/part/I/chapter/V...

[kamjam]

Ahh ok, that makes sense. Thanks for the link.

[arethuza]

I believe that format shifting (e.g. ripping a DVD) is still technically illegal in the UK, although I don't think that anyone has actually been charged.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-13429217