That they jail and fine the founders is somewhat understandable, if only for tax evasion and for making money off other people's IP, but jailing regular users is going too far. There aren't making any profit from watching films, and since we don't know if they'd be ready to pay for that content, it's not clear at all that the film industry is losing anything.
Copyright law is too draconian.<p>At this point, the US should repeal the law completely, and let the chips fall where they may. Hollywood says we'll see a loss of culture (fewer movies, songs, books).<p>Let's find out.
After studying copyright law for music business classes in college, I think that most conversations about piracy could be enhanced by a common understanding of some concepts that current (US) copyright law is based on.<p>The most important, I think, is an understanding of the first-sale doctrine[1], and how it differs from reproduction and distribution rights.<p>Many advocates for piracy argue that distributing copyrighted materials on the Internet is no different than reselling a DVD they previously bought. However, the distinction becomes more clear when we consider that by distributing a movie or song through the Internet, we are also making a copy of it. Modern computers have made it incredibly easy to make a copy of a work, to the point that it doesn't even feel like we're copying something. Because of this, it doesn't feel wrong to share a song or movie.<p>The actual amount of lost sales is immaterial when addressing the binary question of whether or not someone should be allowed to share a movie publicly on the Internet. The right to reproduce and distribute a copyrighted work to the public is solely that of the copyright holder - whether your doing so results in them losing money or not.<p>The question of appropriate penalties, though, is much less clear, and I think it's a shame that prosecutors and rights-holders have pursued defendants as viciously as they have. In many of these cases the judgments are unfairly strict (or at least appear that way), which just makes the MPAA and RIAA look more evil, and hurts everyone in the long run.<p>1: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine</a>
Every time there is a copyright law debate I think about this: <a href="https://github.com/philipl/pifs" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/philipl/pifs</a>.<p>As far as we understand the number pi, every single combination of digit is part of it at some point. So technically Pi already contains a copy of any of your work and your future work even before you think of making it!<p>Doesn't that make digital copyright laws completely obsolete?<p>Now don't get me wrong, I'm not advocating pro-piracy or anything. I just think that our laws made in the 17-18-1900's and monkey-patched to these days are not prepared to handle digital matters. We should reboot our legal system. At least it's digital-matter version.
And the site is back up; but the odds of it being a honeypot are high.<p>What happens in France when you are fined damages far in excess of your wealth, do they garnish future wages?
Is the industry winning the war against piracy? I know some people -cough- who told me -cough (damn what's wrong with my throat?)- that lately it's been extremely hard to find new stuff on bittorrent networks.