[throwawaykf05]

> ... decide privacy is the more worthy goal...

Essentially you are saying, My information is mine and should be under my control because privacy. But your information is "imaginary property" and anyone should be able to take it whenever they wish, because dying business models corruption crooks. Hilarious!

[zanny]

There is a very real difference between people voluntarilly sharing the information they have, and breaking and entering into someones personal networks to steal stuff.

When you torrent a file, you are never participating in an involuntary transaction. And very little torrented material is procured through breaking into secure networks - an example of that would be the half life 2 prerelease source break in.

These are people performing legal valid transactions with businesses (be they physical discs, or digital downloads) and then they share the information they now posses, but under copyright do not own (you never own it unless you are the creator or rights holder) with others that want that information.

Like I said, if you break the encryption on someones private network to steal their data that is still a violation of their property rights because you are breaking in. You aren't stealing, but the act of breaking in is still violating their property rights, or in this context their right to security.

In movie terms, it would be fine for a movie studio to create a film, and never distribute it. Then it is theirs, privately, and nobody has the right to forcibly take it from them, even if the encoded information is valuable to someone or useful. But when they start selling DVDs outside the studios front door, and you buy one and go home with it, rip it and share it on TPB, there is never a violation of voluntary exchange or property rights besides you breaking an implied contract with the media distributor that nobody understands exists and thus no market in the world is operating without it. People also break contracts all the time, and that usually doesn't result in a jail sentence, it results in a secession of business. And IP is ridiculous in how you enter perpetual contracts by having a sequence of polarized magnetic splotches on a composite disk.

Hell, when people try to release software public domain (like sqlite) there is a massive legal morass and their disclosure license is pages long just to cover all the corner cases.

[throwawaykf05]

have no idea what "breaking and entering" has to do with this. My point is simply this: you feel very strongly that you should be able to control "your" information, yet you feel that others who feel they should control "their" information are wrong. (Here, by "you" I mean the strongly pro-privacy folks who are anti-IP. If you believe all information should be free, including your private data, well, at least you're being consistent.)

Note that contrary to your implicit belief, your information is not always locked away, undistributed, in a vault in your basement either; it's all over the place, in the form of every government record on you, every bank account you have, every financial transaction you make and every online account you have. Especially the latter: every move you make on the Internet is tracked by those who monetize it. You are not "sharing" your information, but it exists out there.

And yet you feel violated when somebody accesses it without your consent. Ask yourself why that is. It's simply because you left that information there with an implicit understanding that that information would be used only for purposes that you agree to.

And the same goes for content creators: they don't "voluntarily give away their information", they distribute it with the understanding that those who experience it would compensate for them for it. And they, similarly, feel violated when people access it without due recompense.

IP and privacy are both flip sides of the same coin. After all, the only thing the NSA has on you is a sequence of polarized magnetic splotches on a composite disk.

[waterhouse]

It is possible to generate a random symmetric-encryption key on your computer, put it on a USB drive (or even a piece of paper), meet a friend in person, give them the key, and subsequently use the key to transfer unlimited amounts of copyrighted material between the two of you through the internet.

> have no idea what "breaking and entering" has to do with this.

That should be clear now. The only way for others to obtain the decrypted contents of the transmissions between careful friends in the above situation is with some kind of breaking and entering. The fact that most people don't do this, most of the time, is irrelevant; it is important that we are able to do it if we need to.

The only way to really prevent the above scenario is to make it illegal to do some of the above things: to own a general-purpose computer that won't snitch on you, to meet a friend and exchange something secret without having your person searched, to send encrypted information through the internet, to live in a place that doesn't have cameras watching to see if you're viewing illegal material, etc. (I suppose paying a reward to people for reporting on their neighbors, friends, and family for possessing or distributing illegal material might be reasonably effective too.) IP law is only really enforceable with a police state.

> It's simply because you left that information there with an implicit understanding that that information would be used only for purposes that you agree to.

Actually, sometimes the understanding is reasonably explicit. For example, Gmail has a privacy policy. It says, "We do not share personal information with companies, organizations and individuals outside of Google unless one of the following circumstances applies: [with your consent, with domain administrators, for external processing, for legal reasons]", and later it says, "If Google is involved in a merger, acquisition or asset sale, we will continue to ensure the confidentiality of any personal information".

A website's terms of use take the form of a contractual agreement between the user and the company; the whole thing is a bit laughable, since usually the company doesn't have a human negotiating with the user and the user doesn't read the policy, but the subsequent exchange of valuable services for valuable data can be construed as grounds for some kind of enforceable agreement, and the words of the ToS should at least be a first approximation to what that agreement is. And people justifiably feel violated if someone ... violates the terms of a contract under which they've given up valuable items.

> IP and privacy are both flip sides of the same coin.

Nope. In case you're wondering, if a Google sysadmin decides to publish my emails to the internets, I will be offended and expect him to at least lose his job, and I may have some complaint against Google, but I do not believe I have the right to subsequently prevent anyone else from making copies and spreading them around; they were not bound by any contractual agreement with me. And I expect that, in practice, my emails will probably remain private: the few who could read them (Google employees, the NSA) risk negative consequences (firing, bad press and Google fixing their security breach) if they do anything to reveal they've done it.

By contrast, those who favor IP and use it hope to make exchange-contracts with thousands or millions of strangers, each one of whom is expected to have intimate contact with the information. Reliably preventing any of them from sharing it requires the active intervention of the law and a lot more.

> And they, similarly, feel violated when people access it without due recompense.

It is unfortunate that IP laws and rhetoric have given them such an expectation. I understand some people feel violated when gay people get married in their church or when someone buys a copy of a holy book and burns it. However, to let their feelings control the force of law would have unacceptable consequences for human freedom.

[throwawaykf05]

> It is possible to generate a random symmetric-encryption key on your computer ...

IP law is only really enforceable with a police state.

Non sequitur and false dichotomy. It is also possible to get away with murder [1] or robbery [2] or rape [3]. Does that mean it's useless to enforce murder or robbery or rape laws? All laws are only perfectly enforceable with a police state.

But we don't need perfectly enforceable laws, only practically enforceable laws. And as you yourself admit, pretty much nobody goes through that trouble of keeping their communications secret, and that is why people only need to look to find the IP addresses of all those pirating content.

If everyone had to go through the process of encrypting pirated content and walking over to their friends' and then downloading that content, you can bet piracy rates won't be in the range of terabytes per month in the US alone. I'd guess that's a level of enforcement people can live with.

> ... if a Google sysadmin decides to publish my emails to the internets, I will be offended and expect him to at least lose his job, and I may have some complaint against Google, but I do not believe I have the right to subsequently prevent anyone else from making copies and spreading them around; they were not bound by any contractual agreement with me.

You choose a facile example with "emails", because that has little economic impact to you. What about your social security number? Credit card numbers? You have to give that information out everywhere to all kinds of third parties with no explicit "contractual agreement" in place. Yet once it leaks to nefarious parties, the more widely that private information is spread around, the more pain you will experience.

> It is unfortunate that IP laws and rhetoric have given them such an expectation.

It is not IP laws and rhetoric that have given them such expectation, it's just the age old tradition of being expected to get paid when you produce something of value to somebody else. What is unfortunate is that just because it's so easy to get away with piracy, people have the expectation that they are entitled to taking somebody else's work.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsolved_deaths#Unsolve...

2. https://www.google.com/search?q=unsolved+robberies

3. http://www.safecalifornia.org/facts/unsolved

[mindslight]

Actually no, what I'm saying is that what I choose to say to a friend should not be subject to a third party that demands to listen in. If my friend betrays my trust and shares the contents of that communication, then I can't do much about that.

You're right that I've described a tradeoff and simply assumed the case is closed - I mean, where does this right to privacy come from even? And to me, the answer that settles that question is physics - as long as one-way functions exist, then so does encryption (and it's generally believed that one-way functions exist). So preventing this privacy means restricting general communication, and we all know how that works out.

(PS. It's easier to have an honest debate when you don't knock down straw men with dismissive snide marks like 'Hilarious!'. You might even end up understanding a different point of view - and don't worry, that does not mean you need to agree with it.)

[throwawaykf05]

> Actually no, what I'm saying is that what I choose to say to a friend should not be subject to a third party that demands to listen in.

So when you're "saying something" to a friend that is gigabytes of an exact copy of a movie that somebody else created, why should you be the only one having complete control over it? Trust me, the "third party" has no interest in listening in to what you have to say if you are "saying" stuff that is of no interest to them. But when you intermingle "somebody else's" information with "your" own, obviously that somebody else will feel entitled to, at the least, "listen in".

> And to me, the answer that settles that question is physics ...

Not sure what the point is, but note that all the encryption in the world (allegedly) didn't keep your information out of the NSA's fingers. All the NSA-rage that gets poured on HN on a daily basis, and nobody realizes that they've been doing the same to the music, movie and game industries since the dawn of computers?

> (PS. It's easier to have an honest debate when you don't knock down straw men with dismissive snide marks like 'Hilarious!'. You might even end up understanding a different point of view - and don't worry, that does not mean you need to agree with it.)

It's not a strawman, you just missed my point: It's always amusing that the same people who are so strongly pro-privacy -- essentially your right to control information that you deem to be your own -- are also so dismissive about others' rights to control what they deem to be their information. The irony is overwhelming.

[chipotle_coyote]

While people keep knocking you down for trolling, I think that's actually a really good point.

I don't equate "piracy" to theft (or piracy, for that matter), but I think we're culturally trapped in a very curious mindset. I don't think anyone would argue that the value in a movie or television show or book or any other creative work lies solely in the cost to reproduce a copy -- if anything, we'd be more likely to argue that the cost to reproduce it is incidental to its value. To me, the logical outcome of that is that we should pay for copies of creative materials regardless of the marginal cost because that's never really been what we were paying for in the first place -- and it seems perfectly reasonable to me that, thus, we should honor the wishes of the creators when it comes to price (or the people the creators have ostensibly delegated that responsibility to, i.e., publishers and distributors). But instead we're often arguing that if the cost to copy is effectively zero, the creators and publishers are unreasonable authoritarian police state thugs for saying, "Hey, the cost of the copy isn't where the value lies, and if you're going to enjoy our work you should still pay us."

And, yes, I know all the arguments about publishers (and creators) making unreasonable demands, but I think that makes the line even murkier, not clearer. We don't say "the price you're asking for this physical object is unreasonable, so I'm just taking it without paying for it at all"; why do we think it's fair to say "the price you're asking for this digital object is unreasonable, so I'm making a copy without paying for it?" Yes, the cost to do so is zero, but the value isn't derived from the reproduction cost.