"But it's not necessarily a great demonstration of how all legal decisions are made."

Nor was it intended to be. I'm not suggesting the study was flawed.

The point is, the commenter has no clue which judge will preside over this case and furthermore cannot possibly know the level of technical knowledge the judge will possess. I didn't realize that pointing out the flaws in a comment was something you got down-voted for by the HN elite.

He's trying to strengthen his argument with hyperbole that is not backed up in anyway with real evidence.

The First Amendment protects against compelled speech. While courts might gag you and prevent you from speaking, they almost never compel you to speak. Compelled speech is limited to truthful speech where the statements convey important truthful information to consumers (e.g., health warnings on cigarettes). There is no precedent for a court compelling a company or person to lie.

I agree that it will be quite interesting to see how a court reacts to the idea that a person has constructed a situation in which they must lie in order to avoid disclosing the warrant. I was also interested to learn that Apple publishes a warrant canary: https://ssl.apple.com/pr/pdf/131105reportongovinforequests3.... ("Apple has never received an order under Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act. We would expect to challenge such an order if served on us.")

There must be a line, though. I suspect it would not succeed to publish many statements each like "We have received fewer than than 1,2,3,...,100 warrants of type X this year", or, "We have never received a warrant regarding an individual whose name begins with C", striking only those that are false as warrants are received. I would guess that this would cross a line, though it's difficult for me to articulate why. Ultimately there is no court precedent for warrant canaries, so the outcome is unknown.

Dismissing them trying to exercise a different power than the one they're granted by the law as a "technicality" is a disservice to the rule of law. It's not a mere technicality, it's a fundamentally different kind of action.

[1] I'm sure copyright holders benefited more than suffered from this free advertisement of love but anyway.

But, your point is very important in a legal sense - a simple, but effective way to build a better TPB would be to center it around some other cause, and have it accidentally be used for piracy.

Except, of course, the patent courts -- the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit and their pet district courts in East Texas. In those courts the judges have a personal career interest in how technology is regulated by the patent system. The result is that judges are competent but motivated to use reasoning to reach personally beneficial conclusions rather than ones rooted in objective law and reason.

That's why software patents keep expanding and more tech savvy judges just keep making them expand more when you might think they would keep them under control.

Exactly. The artists that have adapted are the ones whose art is actually valuable, rather than artists who work with the people who control distribution channels. Distribution channels are a lot more prone to disruption than creators of art.

I don't think we should hold back progress. I'm not arguing for legislated compulsory DRM or shutting down the Internet.

I'm just saying I don't have a lot of love or sympathy for people who build businesses on the appropriation of peoples' hard work against their will. I feel the same way about jerks who take OSS software closed without authorization or credit, or who scrape peoples' blog posts and use them for their own click bait sites without even linking to the original author. TPB is in that sort of category.

"Additionally, you should ask artists who's screwing them"...

I have, and trust me... nobody has any love for record labels except maybe some of the indies.

The trouble is that the new model -- the promised land -- is not appearing. There is no new model. The new model is you give your work away for free and starve.

Like I've said, we've gone from a system where there was some opportunity -- albeit in a shitty model with shitty record labels -- to a system with no opportunity outside touring and merchandise sales.

You can squeeze by on that, but you can't build a career on it. Great art requires years of dedication. That means making it a sustainable career, a vocation. Squeezing out a few tunes in between your two day jobs just won't lead to great art.

It also means you're basically a consultant -- a glorified service sector employee. Why is it that programmers are allowed to build equity in startups, but artists are forbidden from building equity in a portfolio of copyrighted works? It's the only vehicle for equity building they ever had. Without some opportunity to build on your work in a non-linear fashion, you are just a wage slave forever.

I guess we're going to reward all those artists and musicians who enriched our lives by making them eat dog food when they're old...?

Sonny Bono always gets bashed for saying copyright should be "forever and a day." I still don't agree with him-- I think that position is too extreme. But I understand where he's coming from now. He understands economics and business.

To build an industry that can pay actual wages, benefits, and invest in new things, you need to build capital. You need some way of building a portfolio of enduring value that can produce recurrent revenue over a long period of time to fund new things and to support the vast overhead that a real profession demands.

Nobody should understand this more than the HN crowd, which is why I have such an uncharitable interpretation of the down votes I always get for pointing these things out.

Want to lionize someone as a freedom fighter? Try someone like Linus Torvalds, or Daniel J. Bernstein, ... someone who ... I dunno ... did actual work of their own to advance the cause of freedom?

My other point is this:

People seem to have this idea that piracy is a rebellious act, that you're hitting back at "the man." I just don't see it. To me it looks more like union busting against the artists... destroying their revenue model so as to beggar them and make them willing to take anything for their work. This in turn benefits the upcoming generation of data-aggregation capitalists who want to monetize everyone's work and use it to sell ads and push surveillanceware. You're scoring one for the man, not against him.

Enforcing copyright pits the artist against their audience and limits the access of impoverished people to our cultural commons. Relying on copyright (ownership of information) to provide revenue steams tends to benefit that 0.1% (owners), not the 99.9%.

We are in the process creating new ways to reward artists for their work.

Non-attribution is an entirely different beast from piracy. Passing someone's work off as your own is despicable. Sharing someone's work, with their name attached, should be lauded.

Personally, how I want things to be is that authors freely release their content and still make a nice living. That's not necessarily natural and certainly not easy but you asked how I want things to be.

The copyright holders did anything to limit access to copyrighted material, just to make it unnecessarily scarce. (Except in the cases where the copyright holder is the actual artist.)

One of Lessig's points is that piracy made Hollywood possible.

To me it's very similar to the war on drugs... Policy and business models need to change. There are always people resistant to change as they want to protect their revenue streams.

My take on The Silk Road was that whilst it was quite possibly bad operational practice that took it down, it could have yielded to traffic analysis. I'd expect the same fate of Tor Pirate Bay.