The thing people really misunderstand here is how explosive this would be in the election. It wouldn't have moved the needle at all, it's just news not an event, no hypothetical master manipulator would bother with this stuff.

I'd say it looks fairly likely that he had something to do with these crimes. Also I wouldn't say they have no evidence just that they probably don't have enough to convict. The arguments for continuing to hold him are pretty thin. He already had unsupervised meetings with family and friends so holding him because they are afraid of evidence tampering seems questionable.

Technically it is not legal to do this. At that point, you're putting on a "public performance", and they may indeed sue you.

Where is the line at which "having a few friends over to watch the game" a public performance? It's up to the NFL's lawyers and the corrupt judges that decades of copyright cartel lobbyists have schmoozed.

For TPB advertisement, do you have numbers on how competitive advertisement space is for a website like the pirate bay? Would startups here forexample be willing to pay top dollars for ads there? Willing to use untraceable methods to pay for it?

I personally have a hard time seeing either PRQ or TPB as massive revenue sources at this point in time.

What makes you say that?

And that's where the entertainment industry's efforts to brainwash people ("you wouldn't steal a car") and to make copyright violation a criminal offense (the longer the sentence, the better) come in: they are all efforts to try to make people so afraid that they'll be honest. What a way to treat their customers.

GPL says: Do what ever you want with the program so long no one become restricted by your actions.

If you patch it and send a proprietary version to someone, it will still be the same program. The difference will be the added restriction. The software license only uses copyright to enforce a "share, and share alike" concept.

Using copyright to restrict distribution, ala the proprietary model, is not the same as enforcing a share alike concept. They might use the same law, but the underlying concept is completely separate. Free and open source licenses are also not commonly enforced against individuals, but proprietary software is.

Or to summarize: Restrict restrictions is good. Breaking restrictions is good. Ignoring restrictions is good. Each 3 is consistent with each other.

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!

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.

> This is exactly what RMS does, and it hasn't exactly worked well for him

I disagree. People pick on RMS for weirdness, but he's been providing a steady viewpoint while things continually degrade. "Right to Read" used to be some far off future scenario, seemingly hyperbolic at the time. The reason he's been so constantly spot on is that he hasn't been pandering to the current conditions of the world, but talking directly about abstract concepts and how they clash.

> You really believe that all [copyright] the world over is really one of those blindingly obvious binary issues ... to the degree that you don't care about changing anyone's mind

Yes, I actually don't care about changing anyone's mind about this with rhetoric, as my entire argument is that personal-use copyright will be made obsolete by communication technologies. Lack of copyright innately rubs people the wrong way (especially USians), and so the same effort that will convince one person through this route is better placed convincing several people (in the proper context) to cut the cord and setup vpn+torrent for pure cost reasons.

Since the two concepts are opposed, the corresponding positive idealistic argument is to preserve and promote the Internet (net neutrality, ISP competition) etc, which I do agree it is worthwhile to convince people of at an idealistic level - even if that just empowers them to politically push back against companies they're wed to directly supporting.

It is a system for heavily indebted people to free themselves of their debt after living on a minimum for five years. It also includes damages due to crimes. [1] It is pretty rare however (5357 in 2013)[2].

There are two requirements: The person has to be indebted enough to not be able to pay off the debt in the foreseeable future, and the procedure has to be reasonable with regards to the personal and economical circumstances of the person.[3] This includes the age of the debt, why they came up and if the person has worked to pay them off.

[1] https://lagen.nu/dom/rh/1996:33 [2] http://www.kronofogden.se/20136.html [3] https://lagen.nu/2006:548 [4] http://www.kronofogden.se/Vemkanfaskuldsanering.html

Personal bankruptcy is usually out of the question for debts arising from unlawful behaviour. You cannot evade damages or a penalty imposed by a court just by filing bankruptcy.

Imagine a legal system where you could. Preposterous.

The damages from a criminal case expire once Statute of limitations hits in, which is in this case 5 years (based on copyright infringement maximum jail time). I do not know when the timer starts to tick, but I would assume it starts once he is serving his sentence.

http://lawline.se/answers/9089

https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preskription

// Swedish

> 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.

Edit: Here's a concrete example of "At best": http://anton.nordenfur.se/paulo-coelho-destroys-piracy-myths...

In 1999, when I was first published in Russia (with a print- run of 3,000), the country was suffering a severe paper shortage. By chance, I discovered a ‘pirate’ edition of The Alchemist and posted it on my web page. A year later, when the crisis was resolved, I sold 10,000 copies of the print edition. By 2002, I had sold a million copies in Russia, and I have now sold 12 million

The vast majority of comments regarded this as outright theft.

If I make copies of your personal data (credit card info, address, name, SSN) and pass it around the Internet, is it a victim-less crime? I'm merely making copies of bits onto a webpage (the other effects shouldn't matter..according to your logic).

The real victims are the people put out of work due to rampant piracy of software and anything else digital. Information wants to be free. Just don't come looking for me to foot the bill when the unemployment rate increases and people are calling for things like basic income.

I'm honestly tired of the "everything should be free" mantra coupled with "We can't figure out why there are no more jobs left..it must be the greedy companies!!! durr!!"

In the worst case, it's absolutely possible that you share something with someone, A, which A would have bought and then they don't buy it. In the worst case they don't in the future buy anything from the author/creator etc. In the worst case I'd consider that author/creator a victim in this case, they would have been paid whatever amount A would have paid but now haven't been.

I'm not arguing that's often the case (I don't think it is) but to absolutely rule it out feels like too much of a simplification. There can be a legitimate victim, it almost certainly isn't the person suing you and in most cases there probably isn't - but there can be I think.

I personally don't think copyright infringement warrants anything near the level of legal activity it had just a few years ago, so I'm glad the RIAA/MPAA are moving away from suing the pants off of everybody. But a lot of people seem to have the idea that copying digital works is morally right as long as you're stealing from a business, and yet simultaneously believe that copyleft should apply all the time, which is doublethink.

> Content protection mechanisms are poisoning computing.

So we should get rid of EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL in the Linux kernel?

You may conclude that someone is insane and force them to be institutionalized, but that is not prison, and the decision is not ever final.

And what if they're a Schizophrenic, stop taking their meds (as such are wont to do) and murders someone even though they had been receiving help?

N.B.: this is not a hypothetical scenario, it describes one of the things that led to the brutal murder of my mother.