Technology

Its only illegal when peasants do it, not when billionaires do it. *

*it being anything.

They want to lock down file sharing so no one else can use the data to build AI now that they have it

“Sonarr has escaped containment 😱!!!”

It was openai or meta that claimed because they didn't seed the torrent that it wasn't really piracy.

So piracy only starts becoming bad when it takes the form of communism/socialism lol.

The theft for a major corperation? Thats just good ol reliable capitalism.

If you tell a joke that you heard from somebody else to a friend you're breaking the Copyright of the creator of the joke.

If Copyright was strictly enforced it would constantly intrude in people's lives and pretty much everybody would turn against it.

Actually they (Republicans) love the government, specifically because it pays them money to pass corporate protectionism bills. Remember, when Republicans take over and lock out the Democrats, then:
~ They no longer need Republican votes, so officials no longer have to serve their constituents
~ The Executive no longer needs Congress, so their money train is in jeopardy. ~ The businesses no longer need lobbyists, so their money train is in jeopardy.

(Considering the level of incompetence we've seen in the federal government lately, it's possible that our congresscritters haven't fully thought this through.)

We're in the AI age now, which has shown us IP laws mean nothing when an entire major industry wants to violate them. This has always been true, as the studios and record labels pirated all the time, but it wasn't as open and in the sunlight as it is with AI development. And Big AI is currently propping up the entire stock market.

It turns out IP laws never meant anything anyway. Copyrights and patents were justified as temporary monopolies to promote science and the useful arts, specifically to produce a robust public domain.

Except it does neither. Artists and scientists are rarely the copyright holders, and to get to own their own stuff, they need to be hot property (still making content) and have good lawyers. Also, the temporary monopolies have become permanent in practice. (much thanks to Walt Disney.) SCOTUS has not only refused to see the public as a stakeholder, but has taken things out of the public domain, so it has to be licensed again, in defiance of the Constitution of the United States.

So now IP law is only a rent-seeking racket. Especially now since you need subscriptions to use your appliances.

But as Sony has made clear for us in 2026, if purchasing isn't owning, then piracy isn't a copyright violation.

This bill is a technology solution and has technology countermeasures. They can order ISPs DNSes and VPNs to block piracy sites, but those sites change all the time, and can do so faster than it takes to update the registries. Furthermore, when services don't follow through, they will get more usage (and will make more money) so there's a perverse incentive to slow walk the updates, and not talk to whoever makes the lists.

We learned this a long time ago when the biggest selling point of ISPs was free porn and free movies.

Like encryption with backdoors for law enforcement, there's no way to nerd harder to make it work.

It also depends on foreign service offerings cooperating with US law. Unless we build the Great Firewall of the US (which, I'm sure, is on the table), US offerings will be obligated to follow the law while foreign ones do not, which will run against the interests of local businesses.

Non of the people pirating content have money to buy more stuff

How DARE you!

My piracy is morally; not financially driven

I would be surprised if most US politicians are capable of understanding the concept of duplicating files on a computer

We got a DNS-based censorship law in Denmark ages ago. It was strictly for blocking child pornography. Today the list also includes: Unlicensed gambling sites, piracy, as well as a handful of sites that "doesn't contain CSAM or other obviously illegal content" (old source, but nothing has really changed except probably the amount of websites on the list)

Censorship will never be limited to what it was first set in motion for. It is just too powerful and it is too tempting to not expand it to cover other "nuisances" a government or its lobbyists might have. If the barrier of entry is just adding a new string to a list, they're gonna add that string to the list.

And if you want to circumvent it you just point your DNS to Quad9, Cloudflare, Google, or any of the DNS services that doesn't implement the filter (including at least one Danish DNS service), so in essence it is pretty useless for the target groups it's meant for.

Quoting the president's actual words is unauthorized reproduction!

Your last paragraph crossed my mind recently as the oil prices really start to spiral out of control. There were so many protests bordering on riots because people were stuck at home due to covid - now we're already hearing news that truckers are starting to sit idle instead of driving at a loss.

Imagine how much free time and how much anger everyone will have when the economy grinds to a halt from product shortages all over the country.

Don't try to explain technology to them. It won't work.

Um... Piracy funds terrorist groups? Handing out software for free earns money?

I tested I2P a number of years ago and havent messed with it since. Been wanting to get back into setting it up for torrenting on my server. Will have to do some research and set it back up this weekend. Nows a better time than any I guess. Thanks for the reminder to start again.