Raided 9-Year-Old Pirate Bay Girl Came To Save Us All

http://torrentfreak.com/raided-pirate-bay-kid-came-to-save-us-all-121125/

by cyphersanctus • 14 years ago

179 73 14 years ago

"Because the public are angry, politicians will be nervous too, and uncooperative politicians are bad news for tougher copyright law. But in the short term anyone sent a “pay-up-or-else” letter from CIAPC (if they even dare to send any more) will be thinking long and hard about paying. The chances of the police coming next time must be slimmer than last week.

And the fact that they will be able to thank a child for that is why this is some of the best news all year."

tterrace• 14 years ago

Is the article really long enough to warrant a TL:DR?

GoRevan• 14 years ago

Hopefully this girl will create a paradigm shift. All of this anti-piracy prosecution makes me feel like im in a dystopian future where hearing music and watching movies is forbidden. :(

firefoxman1• 14 years ago

I wonder if that's part of why the geek community is fighting harder than most: we've all read a couple cyberpunk/farenheight-451-type books and realize that future is not as impossible as once thougnt.

sneak2• 14 years ago

I heard a great song on Spotify today, a service I pay for. Interestingly enough those payments are not for the music, just the ability to listen to the music, as I abruptly realized when I started contemplating using that song in a DJ mix.

jevinskie2• 14 years ago

It won't be forbidden, the industry wants to make money! What will happen is that the microchip implanted in your brain at birth will recognize watermarks in any and all manner of copyrighted works and automatically charge the license fee from your bank account.

mhurron2• 14 years ago

Why would this girl be any different than the number of other people that have been prosecuted for piracy?

There hasn't really been any outrage beyond articles like this before, and there doesn't seem to be any outrage except articles like this now. The public at large doesn't seem to have a problem with any of it.

Nux• 14 years ago

Because it's not quite the same when some employed 30 year old pirates something. This case has an aura of "THINK OF THE KIDS!" - a scam that seems to be working with other issues, but this time in reverse. It's high time these %^&*-suckers got a taste of their own medicine.

I'm all for making a living our of art, but not like this. MAFIAA kind of stuff must end now; they live in the past while ruining the future.

nova• 14 years ago

Intellectual property is the Inquisition of our times.

Hopefully things will turn for the better and people of the future will see our outlawing of non-commercial sharing of data as one of those stupid things the troglodytes of the 21th century did. But IP will die a slow and ugly death.

mattdeboard3• 14 years ago

I suppose we should be grateful that your foolish hyperbole didn't compare IP to the holocaust.

mtgx2• 14 years ago

This "piracy war" is starting to look more and more like the drug war. I could see how in US especially, if marijuana is going to be legalized, all those agencies which would now be left out of work, could refocus on raiding "pirates", barging in and shooting people's dogs, and whatnot. Then this parody might become a reality (the part with the girl at the end):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALZZx1xmAzg

TazeTSchnitzel• 14 years ago

I like the "Political Prostitution" (website now defunct) one: http://vimeo.com/45864549

mtgx2• 14 years ago

Yeah, that one seems very relevant to the story here. Almost forgot about it.

jevinskie2• 14 years ago

Try your analogy again when this piracy war has killed 55,000 people. That is the estimated death toll from just the Mexican drug war that "started" less than 6 years ago (by official tally).

afterburner3• 14 years ago

The Mexican drug war and the US war on drugs are completely different things... In the Mexican drug war, rival drug warlords massacre dozens of civilians because they think they'll be used as mules by the other side; the government then come in force to try to re-establish order in the region. It's more of a civil war, or a war against bandit warlords, or a war against corruption that buys off entire police departments. It's almost a civil war.

The US drug war is mostly an unnecessary but lucrative obsession with jailing people for minor marijuana offenses, at least domestically speaking.

jlgreco3• 14 years ago

Analogies need not indicate equivalence. His works, despite the obvious gap in magnitude.

Strshps1MoreTim4• 14 years ago

Marijuana is never gonna be legalized in US. The current private prison system, the ghettos, supplying soldiers (most with fathers in jail) for the military, etc. works too well for the elite to be messed with.

damncabbage• 14 years ago

What does Washington and Colorado mean for the above now?

michael_h• 14 years ago

  soldiers (most with fathers in jail)

Sounds made up. Citation?

baddox• 14 years ago

> But in what kind of parallel universe does a professional, western police force think it’s appropriate, proportionate and a good use of tax-payers’ money to send officers to a citizen’s home for a petty file-sharing issue, one involving the downloading of a single music album?

That's just it. It's not a usage of taxpayers' money, it's a usage of government money that just so happens to have been taken forcefully from taxpayers. And when you phrase it as "government money," it's not at all surprising that its used this way. Just look at the relationships between a anti-piracy groups and government.

Strshps1MoreTim4• 14 years ago

The so called anti-piracy groups are the real pirates - just a bunch of old, evil, filthy rich owners and CEOs, that would destroy the lives of countless young people without blinking.

Every single successful civilization/culture/religion in human history was based on sharing. The pirates, bribing politicians and police officers, across the western world are destroying the very fabric of our society. Plus the DRM, constant monitoring and logging of internet activity, war on open platforms, like Linux.

pcote• 14 years ago

The problem with this matter is it's been done before. In 2000, pictures of Elian Gonzalez being face to face with swat forces caused only limited outrage. The public was exposed to that case so much that they pretty much got numb to the situation and were downright sick of hearing about it before the raid happened. If anything in overall U.S. Cuba relations changed, it probably had nothing to do with the kid.

It's not that different with regard to file sharing. We've been hearing horror stories over extreme anti-piracy tactics for close to 15 years now. Your average 20 year old doesn't know of a world where this sort of thing doesn't happen. So in this kind of environment, I just don't see how one little girl is going to change anything.

madao3• 14 years ago

Here is the thing, someone has gone ahead and spent time and effort to create and sell something, someone then has gone on out of their way and attempted to steal it.

That being said with any form of piracy it is in effect stealing. If one were to go down to the local store and steal a product from the shelves and make a run for the doors, you will also be caught, brought up to the police, charged and taken before the courts.

Now is the methods being used by the record companies correct? probably not. But do they have a right to try and protect their profits from looters and moochers of the world? they sure do.

I think digital media is the way of the future, especially being able to access it from anywhere in the world with little or no effort.

I just think that piracy in this sense has been taken for granted for much to long and we should work towards naming it as it should be named and stop getting up and arms about it as much as we do and just pay for what we use instead of running off to the local torrent site and downloading the shit out of it.

Osiris• 14 years ago

The problem is this common analogy is completely off base. When you steal from a store, that store had purchased a physical product from a wholesaler. This is know as the "cost of goods sold." The store maintains an inventory of product for which they have already paid a significant sum of money in order to place it on the shelves.

When you steal from the store you remove an item from their inventory which they cannot sell. The cost of that item that was already paid now has to be covered by profits made up from selling other items in the inventory, thus increasing (albeit very little) the price of the rest of the inventory.

In other words, the physical good is moved from one place to another, depriving the original owner of its value.

File sharing, on the other hand, has no marginal cost to each "copy" of a file. If I write a song or software and put it on the internet, it costs me nothing if 1 or one million people share the file (assuming it's not my bandwidth to pay for). Also, if one user downloads my file it does not disappear or transfer from me to them. I do not have to manufacture another item. File sharing is copying. Stealing is transfer of ownership.

So, you cannot directly compare file sharing, which has no marginal cost, to physical items that have a marginal cost of production. What owners of copyrighted works are trying to recover are their fixed costs in producing the work.

wazoox2• 14 years ago

This old dead horse doesn't need any more beating, but apparently the obvious has to be stated once again:

when you copy a digital "good" you don't deprive its owner from it. Therefore this is NOT stealing in any way. Not even remotely akin to stealing.

Let's get it straight a last time (I hope): if you have an apple and I take it, you haven't got it anymore. Digital goods are INFORMATION. When you give me an information YOU STILL F*CKING HAVE IT. By your twisted way of thinking, people reading headlines in papers at the store are burglars, and so are people reading the time on your watch without asking you first. This cannot be the case. This shouldn't be the case. This won't be the case.

madao3• 14 years ago

Your twisting my words now, people pay for headlines with advertising and what not, we are talking about music or perhaps even movies, these people produce and create these forms of entertainment expressly for money, not for your enjoyment or for your friends enjoyment, them make it and package it.

Then someone comes downs rightfully buys it and enjoys the fruits of others labours.

What is not right is to reward artists by telling them that their hard work is just information free to be handed out to everyone, seriously call it what you want, you are stealing from these people. They don’t want you to give it to your friends or random people off the internet, they want you to pay for it.

If you really don’t like it, go and create your content and release it under creative commons and stop watching and listening to commercial movies/radio.

JC0012• 14 years ago

The argument isn't over whether it's a physical token that won't be available for sale. Even without a physical token it's still stealing.

If everyone were to just take digital content without paying for it, would this still be ok?

If so, why would anyone produce the digital content knowing they won't receive compensation?

And how does this apply to other non-digital marketplaces:

If you went to a dentist to have your teeth cleaned, would it be ok to never pay the dentist? After all, the dentist is still able to clean other teeth?

If you had your car towed to a mechanic, does the tow truck driver have to be paid?

Gormo3• 14 years ago

>Here is the thing, someone has gone ahead and spent time and effort to create and sell something,

That's a capital investment. Putting resources into a designing and manufacturing a product before you've got anything to sell is a risky proposition, but it's how the vast majority of all economic activity takes place. Investors bear the risk that people won't be willing to pay for the finished product, and understand that there's a chance that they will lose money instead of making it.

Simply putting effort into creating and selling something doesn't entitle you to a positive return; you have to make something that customers are willing to buy, and people who make their own copies of intangible, non-rival goods are just another category of people who aren't willing to pay. Indeed, in practical terms, they're the last segment of your potential market you'd want to pursue; much better to focus on people who aren't buying your product for other reasons entirely.

> someone then has gone on out of their way and attempted to steal it.

But no one is stealing the work that was created. "Stealing" implies depriving someone of something they own, but this is impossible with respect to creative work. No one can remove the pattern of ideas that defines the work from the creator's mind.

What's happening here is that people are making their own replicas of the creator's original work. This isn't "stealing" anymore than someone is stealing your house by building their own house using a design based on yours.

Making a copy doesn't deprive the original author of anything; all it does is alter the external market conditions under which that author might seek to obtain revenue from selling copies of that original work. But he never had any right to a positive market return in the first place; his profit is inherently contingent on the willingness of others to pay him, and people who aren't willing to pay him because they made their own copies of the work are no different than people who aren't willing to pay him for any other reason, unless you assume that he already had the exclusive right to make those copies.

Do you see the paradox here? You can only posit that the creator has an inherent right to restrict others' copying if you assume that he has an inherent right to a positive ROI when marketing the work, but you can only assume an right to a positive ROI in a scenario where people making their own copies is already legally censured, because otherwise, there's no legal distinction between people who didn't pay him because they copied the work, and people who didn't pay him because they just didn't want the work at all.

JoeAltmaier• 14 years ago

And that's the mental gymnastic that lets people steal all sorts of intellectual property - they rationalize it, pretend it isn't somebody's property and livelihood, and take it mostly because they just want it and its hard to secure so it ok, right?

If I'm not willing to pay him, then he's not owed anything. Hey! I'm not willing to pay for lots of things; now I can just take them. Thanks, Gormo! I'm free of social responsibility!

guard-of-terra• 14 years ago

It's not good to have nine years old girl used in propaganda. We can't prevent this from happening but we should not force it. It's halfway as bad as using child porn fear to censor "pirates". Even half of that is still very bad.

robryan2• 14 years ago

I think for most of us we have gone past the issues with semantics, that file sharing is no the same as stealing. What I am more intersted in is how can content producers be fairly rewarded in this new world and what the future of content production looks like if there is less money for producers. Technology destroying some of the middle men should make producers more even with a smaller pie, which will help a bit. File sharing has been around a long time and yet it still seems more quality content than ever is being produced, maybe the incentives are less of a problem than I think.

brc• 14 years ago

I think the problem is one of momentum. In any given timeframe, only x% of movies/tv productions/music albums/whatever is expected to make y% of the money. I would assume that the people who do the sums on this thing have the numbers nailed down pretty well, but every now and then a Star Wars or a Michael Jackson comes along and you get an outlier which injects a lot of capital into the industry.

So the numbers would be declining, but it's hard to know if this is specifically from file sharing, or just from an audience not engaged with a specific product. But the content investors don't know any other game, so they keep investing. It might take ten years of no big hits, no outliers before they decide the game has permanently changed.

And besides, maybe the ROI is so good that it can take a 50% cut and still be better than anything else they can easily get involved in.

When big industries peter out, it's usually not evident until hindsight has been introduced what was the point where it was no longer worth committing any capital. There is a lot of momentum pushing them along, particularly in very established demographics.

Eventually either a new way of earning cash from production will pop up, or, more likely, the returns to investors in entertainment will head back to the levels experienced by many other industries. The barriers to entry for new talent will be lower (less gatekeepers) but the overall outsized returns to a small number of individuals will probably permanently lower. Because it's hard to dominate an industry and make massive returns without structural, legislative or oligopolistic barriers to entry to competition.

robryan2• 14 years ago

I guess what remains to be seen, is that if outsized returns are off the table, whether you will still see big budget stuff that pushes the industry forward.

With something like Game Of Thrones you can see the results of a much bigger budget compared to things like Rome and Merlin. The new push towards virtual sets might be able to bridge the quality gap between the real big budget productions and lower budget content at the moment.

wisty• 14 years ago

> What I am more intersted in is how can content producers be fairly rewarded

Well, the rest of the entertainment industry isn't so keen on this.

scotty792• 14 years ago

http://i45.tinypic.com/ljwnl.jpg

I read this comic when I was a child. I was appalled by the cruelty of this scene. It was about illegal artifacts from different time but I it really comes to mind when I'm reading the story of that girl today.

lutusp• 14 years ago

> I was appealed by the cruelty of this scene.

I'm pretty sure you were appalled, not appealed.

scotty792• 14 years ago

Fixed now. Thanks for correction.

yason• 14 years ago

Eventually this will just make people transfer to, for example, I2P torrents or something.

It takes one good effort that bundles the I2P codebase, the required plugins and an I2P BitTorrent client such as Robert into a single application that just launches with one click of the mouse and without any further configuration needed and provides a browser view to the I2P torrent trackers as well as the BitTorrent client itself (or the equivalent hops for some other onion style network) and you're pretty much set for genuinely anonymous BitTorrent masses.

These systems, such as I2P and Tor, are designed to be resilient against oppressive governments so the MAFIAA just don't have a chance if the traffic goes underground. What next? MAFIAA would try to make it illegal to use your computer for anything else than connecting to pre-approved websites with MAFIAA approved browsers? Gimme a break.

Raided 9-Year-Old Pirate Bay Girl Came To Save Us All

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