Hard News: The file-sharing bill
340 Responses
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Andrew E, in reply to
Even if they did push that through, it wouldn’t stop file-sharing
Can't stop the signal.
#serenity
Jonathan Young = Jayne Cobb on the intelligence scale?
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Russell Brown, in reply to
Careful disclaimers on Youtube’s part shift liability to the end user, but at the end of the day I can search for any video on google, use a stream capture plugin and create a .flv on my machine of that video, should I want to do that.
I’ve done so not through a shadowy underground network, but by simply clicking on a page that has not yet been subject to a takedown notice and using a legal tool for an illegal purpose.
We all watch infringing material on YouTube, even the copyright crusaders.
And yes, now you mention it, I have an excellent Safari extension that allows me to capture material for use under the fair dealing provisions of the Copyright Act 1994.
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nzlemming, in reply to
Jonathan Young = Jayne Cobb on the intelligence scale?
Nah, I think Young’s the narc they dumped in the first episode.
Jayne's way smarter than that.
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Andrew E, in reply to
Nah, I think Young’s the narc they dumped in the first episode.
Jayne's way smarter than that.Yes, come to think of it, you're right.
This distraction into Firefly/Serenity matters is somewhat appropriate given the means by which I first encountered the programme.
Moving back on topic...
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Lucy Stewart, in reply to
Jayne’s way smarter than that.
At the very least, he has much better taste in colleagues.
Can’t stop the signal.
Or take the Sky (content)? ;)
This distraction into Firefly/Serenity matters is somewhat appropriate given the means by which I first encountered the programme.
For me, that's actually an excellent example of how downloading works in conent-holders' favour - I never would have shelled out the very large amount of money for the Region-1-only Firefly DVDs if I hadn't watched it through rather less legal means. Ditto for Serenity, obviously.
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Sacha, in reply to
fair dealing provisions
we all need to become journalists or teachers
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giovanni tiso, in reply to
We all watch infringing material on YouTube, even the copyright crusaders.
Including this one:
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Rich of Observationz, in reply to
I just configured a VPN on an Amazon AWS cloud instance (basically, a virtual server running in the US or elsewhere). It works, after a fashion. About 300kbps (on a 2M circuit from here), so probably needs a few tweaks.
You can watch Youtube on it though. Amazon have a free tier of service (10G of traffic a month) which would probably be workable. Needs a credit card - I'm going to see if a Pressy Card works.
I think it might be worth it to keep the government out of my internet.
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Sean Murgatroyd, in reply to
We all watch infringing material on YouTube, even the copyright crusaders.
Oh thank god someone else has come to that conclusion! Yes.
Also:
Yes, if you were torrenting kiddy-porn, then the authorities would really want to know who exactly was responsible. But that's not going to be of interest to copyright enforcers - they're not interested in real crimes.
This.
Protection of "intellectual property" is not about prevention of crime. Plagiarists can also put a (c) at the bottom of a page, and if they do so first, they win.
Please, nobody steal off me by remembering the words I just typed.
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Jacqui Dunn, in reply to
including voting against Gareth Hughes’s sensible amendment to remove one of the worst features
I heard him on bFM about an hour ago. He's very clear, very forthright, and I believe, will some day be PM. Quite the most intelligent speaker on this subject, from Parliament, so far. But that wouldn't take much doing! He remarked on how much support his speech got via Twitter, which encouraged him, but also that Parliament is behind the times with regard to the internet.
Has Labour said why they didn't support his amendment? I'm thoroughly disappointed about that. What on earth is going on?
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giovanni tiso, in reply to
Plagiarists can also put a (c) at the bottom of a page, and if they do so first, they win.
Not really, no.
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Rex Widerstrom, in reply to
the officer ... fraudulently, with intent to intimidate a suspect, lied to the suspect,
Hah! Takes me back to my first arrest... or was it my second? Anyway, a long time ago as shall become apparent.
Mr Plod storms into the interview room and tells me my friend is next door, confessing all and blaming me. Of course he was doing no such thing (at least partly because we were innocent, as a court later determined).
Fortunately, though only a callow youth I was already a cynic so my response was "You've spent too long watching Hill Street Blues" (yes, it was that long ago). That resulted in a most unseemly outburst involving words which would have got an innocent rapper arrested.
Since then virtually every contact I've had with the police, either directly or on behalf of someone else, has uncovered lying to suspects.
There was the time they told me that they had a "car full of witnesses, cleaners going to work early" who'd seen me set fire to my own vehicle in the early hours. For the insurance, apparently. Except it was uninsured and I was left catching the bus.
Evidently those witnesses turned out to be "unwilling to come to court" so I was "lucky to get off" when they withdrew the charge.
And so on...
Complaints just from me would crash the IPCA website, I suspect :-D
Sadly, though, court after court has okayed lying to a suspect as a legitimate interrogation tactic, even if the intent is to intimidate (because the intent is almost always to intimidate).
Mind you, there's always the chance the IPCA will take a different view, so kudos for taking the time (please don't think the purpose of this is to mock your efforts!) and do please post the results.
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Sean Murgatroyd, in reply to
Not really, no.
No. But that model certainly is being exploited by patent trolls far and wide.
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The problem for the government is that they have now taken responsibility for policing internet content and in doing so entered an impossible arms race. Hoovering up the ip addresses from public torrent trackers is easy and will provide an initial gratifying deluge that proves their law is working. But the organized release groups that seed torrents also post the files on file hosting services like rapidshare megaupload filesonic etc, indexed by search engines like filestube and accessible with any browser or clients like jdownloader. They post them on usenet groups accessible on premium usenet providers. None of which make the ip addresses accessible and all available encrypted through VPNs. So NZers just end up funding the file hosting services and premium usenet providers instead of using p2p. Many users have already come to the conclusion that in a country with capped bandwidth providers that file hosting subscriptions are better value than losing the seeding bandwidth to p2p.
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Rex Widerstrom, in reply to
Are there an PAS readers who would consider standing for parliament. We just have to do better than this.
And into which box of fruit loops would we jump, exactly?
Unless Russell's up for forming a PAS party, in which case I'm ready with my sub :-) Because there's a broad range of thought here, but the common thread is that it's intelligent and rarely, if ever, falls back on a cultish adherence to "party loyalty" at the expense of reason.
I mean, I'm just reading about the work of Andrew Leigh a federal Labor MP. Did his PhD at Harvard under Robert Putnam (whose work on societal disconnect is worth reading, and tangenitally relevant to the whole file sharing topic, if anyone has time).
Returned to Australia, became an economics professor at the Australian National University. Undertook an Australian study mirroring Putnam's work and published it as a book, Disconnected.
I have no idea what Leigh's positions on issues are. I may disagree with all of them. But I suspect they'll be well thought out, factual and evidence based even if I dispute the conclusions he draws from that evidence. And I suspect they'll be concisely and intelligently expressed.
Now I'm not saying the NZ Parliament ought to be stuffed with PhDs. But do we have even one person with the sort of academic track record Leigh has? Do we have a successful business person? (not a slippery derivatives trader, I'm talking about someone who's built up a business, employed people (and not just an occasional farm manager) and so on). Probably the closest we have is Steven Joyce!
Yes, we must do better. But as I've said many times before, party selection procedures:
a) require mindless adherence to the prevailing orthodoxy (which they see as "loyalty") rather than embodiment of certain principles but disparate opinions as to how to enact them; and
b) a good dose of teh stupid, so as not to be too much of a risk of challenging the existing order.To do better, we need a better vehicle. the old ones are broken down and, for all that I admire the optimism and dedication of those who believe they can be fixed, I don't think they can.
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but also that Parliament is behind the times with regard to the internet.
Heh...you should hear the Speaker on the tabling of quotes from blogs. He can barely bring himself to say the word.
Of course there is the youtube of him floating about wherein he promises to resign from Parliament if he doesn't get the student loan scheme cancelled. So he may be a tad tender about the intertubes... -
Thank you, glennd and Matthew Poole, my questions have been cleared up. And that demonstrates the beauty of PAS.
So if use of a VPN is going to force an ISP to work very hard to track down the illegal downloaders (and clearly its already hard enough even without a VPN), and VPN use is so common among, for example, China-based expats who want to keep up with the likes of Facebook, Twitter and Youtube, that it seems clear the technical barriers to using a VPN are very low (like, if you can use a credit card and perhaps download and install a bit of software, you're good to go), what's to stop internet users in NZ using VPNs to continue on as per usual?
Then how do they resolve the difference in geographical and virtual location? Could somebody given an infringement notice then say, "Well, no, my body may have been in NZ, but because I was online in China/Chile/Britain/generally somewhere else, you'll have to sue me under their laws"?
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Sacha, in reply to
Has Labour said why they didn't support his amendment?
Check their own blog and tell us what you think they're saying. I'm unclear beyond some general mumble about compromise. They're drawing a fair caning about it.
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Matthew Poole, in reply to
But that model certainly is being exploited by patent trolls far and wide.
Patents != copyrights.
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And like my point above about torrents using a VPN doesn't mean that one is evading the law - one might just care about personal privacy or have commercial secrets you don't want flying free on the net - I use them all the time to work with client's software, to protect their commercial secrets something I'm bound to do by my consulting agreements
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Chris Waugh, in reply to
The problem for the government is that they have now taken responsibility for policing internet content and in doing so entered an impossible arms race.
Hmmm... The Chinese government is pretty good at that internet policing thing...
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Sacha, in reply to
it's intelligent and rarely, if ever, falls back on a cultish adherence to "party loyalty" at the expense of reason
Sadly that's still regarded as being class traitors by some.
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Jacqui Dunn, in reply to
Check their own blog and tell us what you think they're saying.
Oh-oh. No time and I'm away for the evening. Will have a look tomorrow. (Ever the procrastinator!)
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Matthew Poole, in reply to
Do we have a successful business person?
Anderton became general manager of an engineering firm, I believe. He's a dirty capitalist at heart.
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Sean Murgatroyd, in reply to
Patents != copyrights.
Intellectual property = intellectual property. You seem to be assuming that if I use an analogy that's broken some identifiable respect that I'm using a broken analogy. Every analogy is broken, because the real world is the only thing that maps to the real world.
I'm merely pointing out that intellectual property is the wider conversation taking place, being played out in copyright law. Creative Commons also != Copyright, but there are equivalences that can be discussed.
Keep up, eh!
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