What I wonder about, is they should be the "creators" and steering committee for the worlds own PnP DNS servers... I would gladly host a small portion of DNS spaces on my machines running at home...
I know nothing about this but given that DNS is quite low volume, distributed peer-to-peer DNS services sound really promising. It would definitely be interesting to hear someone with knowledge in this to chime in.
TPB could (inadvertently) change the structure of the internet.
Hosting DNS is already mostly distributed; that's not the hard part.
The difficulty is setting up a distributed system that can allocate domains and prevent others from tampering with the records (e.g., what if I reply to a query for gmail.com with my own IP, pointing to a phishing site?)
One possible solution is namecoin[1], which is based on bitcoin's proof-of-work protocol.
I haven't though about this carefully but I wonder what the shortcomings of the following would be: when a domain 'owner' wants to update their DNS entry, they just push out a PGP-signed (or similar) message of their new IP onto a P2P swarm, which will only propagate your message if their message verifies with their public key, from which you can then grab the entry (and verify it again for extra security). Then, registering your domain would just consist of getting the swarm to accept your public key. Of course, this could be first-come first-serve, or it could be regulated in some way. This way you could have multiple swarms, and each swarm is only governed by their own decisions.
And I suppose on a smaller scale, TPB could create their own swarm right away, and have people use it parallel to existing DNS infrastructure. Then other censored domains could jump onto their swarm.
You're right, it doesn't look like the project advertised 2 years ago got past the idea stage.
Assuming someone actually tried, however, I don't think I'd be as worried about tampering as you have suggested... Firstly, SSL and whatever certification system used in the future will still exist to prevent man-in-the-middle hijacking, meaning even if trivial to do (like defacing Wikipedia), I do not think it will occur substantially unless as a form of DDoS (as in defacing Wikipedia), and second... by implementing something like the possibility of manual pinning and upstream authority/record-source blacklisting (a common technique in P2P apps, with an anology in Wikipedia to marking a page/record "frozen" for a period due to contention), it would be possible to preserve consensus, overriding/responding to the current level of state censorship for the forseeable future. If governments more broadly dictate filters, that will change the nature of things (and of Wikipedia... They will be able to change history), but we are not there yet nor do I think we will be there on the order of 5-10 years (and something like this might slow that timeframe). I also think people are getting more vocal about the negative aspect of imaginary property enforcement. ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5606921 )
Forgive my ignorance, but how did they secure the .bit TLD in the first place? Is this part of the whole slew of new TLDs that are coming out? They must have had a benefactor to make this happen.
Namecoin isn't ICANN. You install the software and whenever your machine does a lookup for the .bit TLD it uses their lookup system instead of sending it to the DNS resolver.
Namecoin is a very interesting project, but I prefer PPC coin's proof-of-stake algorithm to bitcoin's proof-of-work for long-term stability and robustness.
DNS is probably the wrong word. You want some new method of name resolution, not DNS.
The thing with DNS is that it actually works pretty well as a distributed system. There are a bunch of different people responsible for different TLDs. If the operator of one TLD is censoring you, you can use a different one.
There are really two primary concerns with DNS. The first is that even if you have a domain using a TLD whose operators are unwilling to censor it, local DNS resolvers can still try to block it. This is not that hard to fix; either use a DNS server in a different country or (if your network blocking non-local DNS) do your DNS queries over Tor or some other secure proxy. It's also one of the things that DNSSEC or DNSCurve are supposed to prevent, if anyone would ever get around to implementing either of them. So this is solvable but non-ideal because it requires all the individual end-users to do something.
The second problem is that ICANN doesn't allow just anyone to operate a TLD, which means that the TLD operators themselves become choke points. Then censorial entities who see a TLD operator refusing to censor can put pressure on them (or their home country's government) to try to force the censorship.
So what you want is really to replace ICANN and the TLD operators with something more distributed, but the question is, with what? If you want a memorable but globally unique name then you need some method for everyone in the world to agree who it is that name should refer to. Right now the method is "if the name ends in .com, it refers to who Verisign says it does" and so on for other TLDs. You have trusted entities who can authoritatively determine who controls the domain.
I think (someone correct me if I'm wrong) that namecoin is trying to fix this with something along the lines of bitcoin, where whoever uses a name first gets to keep it. The problem there is that you need a way to make sure when it becomes popular you don't end up with a land grab and all the reasonable names end up in the hands of scammers and squatters, and I'm also not sure how they're addressing transferability and abandonment.
Just thinking out loud here, but how about this: Create a version of ICANN that works like IETF. No relationship to ICANN other than to refuse to issue TLDs that have already been issued by ICANN (and hopefully vice versa). Then, if you want a TLD, you can go to this group of people (who are maybe people like EFF members or well-known security researchers or activists) and they come to a consensus about whether you should get the TLD. So if EFF asks for ".eff" they get it. If ACLU asks for ".aclu" they get it. If La Quadrature du Net asks for ".lqdn" they get it. If Debian Foundation asks for ".debian" they get it. FSF gets ".fsf" on and on. But if some scammer asks for ".bank" they can go pound sand. Maybe make them sub-domains, so you end up with ".eff.foo" and they all end in ".foo" (insert whatever you like) to reduce possible collisions with ICANN. The idea will be to have domains outside the control of ICANN or anyone in particular and issue several hundred to generally well-known and trustworthy entities who are likely to resist censorship efforts. Then those entities can issue "wikileaks.aclu" and "wikileaks.eff" to wikileaks etc., so censoring them requires censoring all the anti-censorship organizations.
Once the working group assigns a TLD, they no longer have any involvement. They don't operate any technical infrastructure. All they do is publish the name of the domain and the public key of the entity it's assigned to (which can be used to sign domains in the TLD), to serve as the authority for resolving namespace collisions. Once an assignment is made it's permanent and irrevocable. The assigned organization's public key gets published and browser and OS vendors start including it and using it to authenticate domains in the TLD, resolved using whatever distributed system you like (that part is basically a solved problem) to map names to addresses.
I suppose you could have an even less centralised system to resemble Tor hidden services. This transcript of Assange and Schmidt's meeting discusses this at a certain point, just grep for 'hash'[1]. That way the domain name itself is proof of its authenticity.
Couldn't you also have something akin to bitcoin's blockchain, where the identity of a domain is agreed upon by the majority of the creators of the blockchain? I don't know what the equivalent of mining would be though. Assange also suggests how domains could be made hard to make, so that they can be 'mined', creating scarcity so that "some arsehole" doesn't "register every short name themselves"[sic].
>I suppose you could have an even less centralised system to resemble Tor hidden services. This transcript of Assange and Schmidt's meeting discusses this at a certain point, just grep for 'hash'[1]. That way the domain name itself is proof of its authenticity.
Using a hash as the name can be useful, especially where the name is only being read by a machine, e.g. you post a link and somebody can just click it, or it's part of your app which you're only using instead of an IP address in case the IP address changes. Or you can put it in a QR code or use NFC on mobile devices etc. The trouble is that it causes the name to be full of encoded data and humans can't remember it. You would still like some way of using memorable names for instances where someone is going to have to type the thing.
>Couldn't you also have something akin to bitcoin's blockchain, where the identity of a domain is agreed upon by the majority of the creators of the blockchain? I don't know what the equivalent of mining would be though. Assange also suggests how domains could be made hard to make, so that they can be 'mined', creating scarcity so that "some arsehole" doesn't "register every short name themselves"[sic].
I was thinking about something like that, it seems like the trouble is how do you calibrate the amount of work to be done. If you make it massive (like $200,000 worth of CPU time on Amazon) then you're excluding a lot of the people you wouldn't want to exclude, or causing them to waste a lot of money. But anything significantly less formidable just isn't going to solve the problem -- at $200 you can still imagine a slew of jackasses registering all the short names. Especially when they're evildoers who are using a botnet and don't actually have to pay anything for the computing resources. And that also doesn't solve the problem of scammers getting ".bank" or ".irs" or something, where the point isn't that they're getting too many names, it's that they're getting unreasonably misleading names.
I was thinking about this for a while and I suspect many others as well. We don't really need icann in the current form. I appreciate your thoughts as they provide insight into ways to go about it that I wasn't thinking much.
What others said, something like a service behind tor, which would be immune to government interference (to a point obviously) and that would provide flexible name resolution. I think you touch on that quite a bit by saying you would give tld to anyone who asks first. I think ability to get name that is yours without affecting others who would like that name is essential.
re: "The problem there is that you need a way to make sure when it becomes popular you don't end up with a land grab and all the reasonable names end up in the hands of scammers and squatters, and I'm also not sure how they're addressing transferability and abandonment."
.bit domains do expire approximately every 9 months I believe, unless you spend more namecoins to re-register them using your private key in which case you re-register said domain for 9 more months.
Abandonment happens if you no longer own the private key used to register the domain and/or you no longer make payments into the network.
This is good, the problem is "and hopefully vice versa". ICANN can break this by grabbing contested names and counting on the fact that 99% of users will see what they want them to.
Not really. For anyone whose device supports the new name resolution system, if the TLD it's doing a look up on is associated with a public key then there would be no reason to even use normal DNS (which is significantly less secure because it has no widely implemented method to verify that the response is authentic).
I have been reading up on sub marine cables lately as the cable cuts in Egypt has reduced our international data transfer substantially here in Bangladesh.
This add from one of the companies in that market got me thinking that TPB should start a fundraiser to establish fiber connection to such an independent island and thereby gain greater independence.
It seems the switch to a new domain name has broken the ISP censorship in the UK. thepiratebay.se redirects to a site blocked page. thepiratebay.is works.
I'm sure it won't be long until they block it again but this domain change as well as the numerous proxy sites setup to bypass the block go to show that it's a waste of time to even try blocking stuff like this.
Does anyone know if the ISP's will be automatically required to block the new domain or if it would have to go through court again?
I'm on Virgin Media (UK) and thepiratebay.is doesn't work here. This implies that they don't have to go through the court.
I suspect if the new domain is being run by the same organisation they are required to block instantly. I wonder what the legal issues are if The Pirate Bay splits into multipel organisations hosted on different domains.
No I don't believe so, the original "source sites" are all done by court order, so people like ORG have reported on them, but clone sites, and new DNS names for existing sites, are simply blocked by request of the BPI.
"Once a site is blocked, its alleged clone sites can also be blocked, but in this case, BPI will be able to practice this without a court order. The decisions would be made between BPI and ISPs and will not be published."
This is crazy. I understand that the hammer needs to go fast in that whackamole game but they should at least publish the list of blocked domains to allow external verification. This is a slippery slope to censorship.
The censorship in the UK is only there to discourage new or computer inexperienced users. Tools such as Tor has always worked, and will continue to work for a predicted long time into the future. Access to a indexing site of a few hundred MB is close to impossible to censure, and quite hard to even make inconvenient.
I'm using BT Broadband in the UK and thepiratebay.is is not responding for me. Although I don't get the "Error – Site blocked" message that I get when trying to access priatebay.org, it just never loads.
Traceroute stops working somewhere in the BT network (just getting * * * after ukcore.bt.net) so I'm guessing it's being blocked.
American here using "The Cloud" wifi in Barbican Center in the City of London. Same deal: never loads. However, after connecting to my VPN back home in the U.S. it loads immediately.
> this domain change as well as the numerous proxy sites setup to bypass the block go to show that it's a waste of time to even try blocking stuff like this.
Yes, it's trivially easy to still get to these sites. And all the other sites with this content.
Currently enta.net, however I can't really recommend them (beyond the fact that they don't filter). I'm intending to switch to Andrews & Arnold as soon as FTTC is rolled out in my street, which is supposed to be real soon now.
Can they actually hold off collective might of media houses and billionaires who actually call the shots and make politicians dance to their tunes, mostly because of they have taken the dirty money? What if the bullies resort to proxy arm twisting?
One must remember Iceland was invaded[1] by the British during WW2!
PS. An invasion is an invasion even if it was said that the invasion was to pre-empt another invasion.
I'm not really sure it's bullying per se, to try and stop the mass illegal downloading of your content. It's not like they've got thugs at the door, they're just trying to shut down a site who's sole purpose is enabling the illegal downloading, and who has no interest in co-operating with even nicely worded, fair requests. I'm not a great fan of the entertainment industry, but if people were doing this to YC startups who focus on IP production, would the level of "support" be the same?
I mean, what alternative do people suggest for these companies? That they ignore it, thus tacitly approve it, until everyone uses and doesn't bother with legal avenues? I hear a lot about "Well, find a new business model!", without explaining why a company should be forced to change based on clearly illegal activity. Even accepting the pragmatic argument that "It's going to happen anyway", I'm curious as to what business model people are suggesting?
Im going to try to keep it short, but its hard given the many different topic you touched on.
Any company that solely depend on government granted monopolies for their businesses model will have a hard time to claim a moral high ground or demand that the sovereign of foreign countries should be violated.
The business model I would suggest is one that do not solely depend on government grants. That would likely be to produce a product or rendering a service that others are willing to pay for.
Can you suggest a business not dependent on government grants? As far as I can tell, every business in the world is. Any form of property rights is a government granted monopoly. The only natural law is "If I'm bigger than you, I'll take what I want". No matter what business you're in, you're relying on government protection to stop me just smacking you on the head and taking your stuff, whether it's tangible physical goods or IP. They only difference here is that the internet has rendered the head smacking part obsolete for IP, so people can skip straight to taking the stuff.
I have heard this argument before, but you are making a rather big claim when doing so. If all property rights is government granted monopolies, you are then saying that the government is the owner of all and everyone’s property.
That mean you don't own that car. Its the government car that they have given to you under a granted permission to use it. Same goes for your house. All they need to render the third amendment void is taking back their granted permission. Basically we are now describing a capitalistic governed country like the US as if it worked like an communist controlled one.
So before I continue down this line, do you really claim that government is the rightful owner of everyones property? If not, then we must separate physical property with government granted permissions.
> If all property rights is government granted monopolies, you are then saying that the government is the owner of all and everyone’s property.
Your trouble stems from a boot-strapping problem. Property ownership doesn't exist in the statute of nature. Thus, the government doesn't need to "own" property in order to grant rights to it.
What exists in the state of nature is control of territory (or anything) by virtue of force. The government's right to grant monopolies in the form of exclusive property rights doesn't derive from its ownership of say land, but from its dominance over that land through force as against any other entity.
Since a government's power is drawn from its populous, I would argue with your conclusion as to who is granting whom control. (A state divided cannot stand.)
The people, acting through government, grants specific people, monopolies over particular property. That's all that property rights are--my community, acting through government, agreeing to come to my aid if I'm dispossessed of my property outside the framework of rules we have collectively established. That agreement is what distinguishes property rights from mere posession.
Gotcha - I grant myself my property, which I already had, by way of possession. :)
I see the subtlety of the point you are making - that property is defined collectively (otherwise it is mere possession) - but I am making an equally subtle point about the underlying meaning of that definition: that collective responsibility is just a statistic on a population of individuals, not a statistic about an entity.
Except that the notion of property ownership predates written records and organized government. Copyright was started in the 17th century to address the failure of previous censorship efforts in a world of new technology (the printing press), and eventually became a means by which printers could secure a competitive advantage.
We now live in a world where the machines needed to copy things are commonly owned by individuals. Copyright, having been designed to regulate industry, is massively out of date -- individuals do not have the resources needed to decide if they are abiding by copyright. Even the entertainment companies that cry about the importance of copyrights know this, which is why they keep pushing for DRM. No sane person actually believes that normal people are going to stop and think about whether or not they are obeying copyright laws; that is just not how people generally behave.
The truth is, in the 21st century copyright is nothing more than a red flag law that exists solely to protect obsolete industries.
At least you are consistent: You make our rights a creation of government. This has the interesting side-effect of elevating intellectual property to the same level as real property.
You have to wonder if the framers talked about our actual natural rights in such disrespectful terms: "The saying there shall be no monopolies lessens the incitement to ingenuity, which is spurred on by the hope of a monopoly for a limited time, as of 14 years; but the benefit even of limited monopolies is too doubtful to be opposed to that of their general suppression."
You know what industry is truly obsolete? The film industry. I mean the actual film-itself industry. Why? Because producers, studios, and exhibitors have nearly completed the move to all-digital pipelines. The product formerly made by Kodak and Fuji and processed by companies like Technicolor and Deluxe no longer has a market (or at least not one of any appreciably size). Thanks to digital media, the industry that produced and developed celluloid media has been rendered obsolete.
Does this strike you as being even remotely analogous to the situation faced by the people who make television, movies, books, and music?
> Except that the notion of property ownership predates written records and organized government. Copyright was started in the 17th century...
So what? The previous poster's point is that both forms of property are social contracts. All private property, physical or otherwise, are nothing but societal agreements, regardless of whether there is a written record or what point in history the agreement began.
IP is a granted permissions by the state. It can not be owned by the individual.
The same goes for any other form of permissions. If I get a government permission to sell drugs or produce weapons, I would not call that a property right, comparable to the car I own. The permission to enter a house is not comparable to the property right of the person who owns the house.
If we look at copyright specific, it is an intrusion into the property right of others. Its not just a permissions, but also a restrictions of the actually property owners rights. By calling copyright a property equal to physical objects, we are making the term property meaningless to the point of contradiction.
All "property rights" are sets of permissions granted by the state to an individual (or legal entity) to certain exclusive privileges with regard to whatever it is the "property right" relates to. This is just as true of rights to tangible personal property (like an iPhone) or real property (like a house) as it is to intellectual property (like a copyright), or intangible personal property that is not intellectual property (like a stock).
"They only difference here is that the internet has rendered the head smacking part obsolete for IP, so people can skip straight to taking the stuff."
No. The internet has rendered the "taking your stuff" part obsolete. When you "take my stuff" I no longer have "my stuff". However when you "copy my bits" I still have "my bits". It is the essential difference between Property and Intellectual not-actually-Property.
Many things are in this category, not just IP. Paying for them can be kind of tricky, because who wants to spend a year, say, writing a book when someone decides they can just go ahead and copy it.
IP has been a pretty good, if imperfect solution to the problem. Those wishing to be rid of it ought to either try and suggest another way of producing information goods, or be honest enough to say they have no idea and that information goods that require substantial time and effort may not be produced in large quantities in their imagined future.
About 10 years ago I had pretty much this exact conversation with RMS over email. As a video game developer, I made box software that I needed people to buy in order for me to get paid. I put it to him that without keeping our code and assets "closed" we couldn't make games. RMS's response was that he'd rather we not make games then: if we couldn't make them "open" then he'd rather we not make them at all.
I still write software for money. GNU/Linux is still doing rather well. Thanks to the law, I still get to make that business model choice.
However, I do not confuse a car with a piece of software or music track. If we are discussing moral rights, or "property", we cannot have such a discussion without being clear on our terms. Nobody is smacked on the head, nor any "stuff" taken, when someone torrents an MP3. However, people continue to die having their "stuff" taken.
I think RMS' response is honest, even if I disagree with it to some degree. What I dislike are the handwavy answers about people being able to work on stuff without some source of funding.
Right, but the bone of contention isn't the bits, it's the money that should, by law, change hands when a copy is made and which (quite obviously) doesn't.
You make a copy, you own me money. You decide to keep that money instead, and it's the moral equivalent of reneging on a debt or bouncing a check.
> Any company that solely depend on government granted monopolies for their businesses model will have a hard time to claim a moral high ground or demand that the sovereign of foreign countries should be violated.
All forms of property are a government granted monopoly. God doesn't give you a monopoly over your lawn or the things you create with your hands, Uncle Sam does.
Not really. Ownership of land, chattels, etc. are usually considered natural rights--- the government protects your ability to own things, it does not grant you that ability.
Copyright, trademark, patents, etc., are different; they were not considered natural rights, but are a social engineering effort, attempting to produce specific effects in society ("the progress of science and the useful arts", e.g.) by means of government-subsidized policy.
As an analogy, consider another government-granted monopoly, say taxi medallions. They're quite valuable in some markets. But they're entirely an artificial right, created by the city for the city's own reasons, not an inherent one.
Or on the opposite side, consider e.g. liberty or free speech. In the American or liberal conception, those are innate, inalienable rights. We create a government that hopefully helps us exercise those rights, but the rights inhere directly in us--- they are not granted by the government or some other third party.
"natural rights" are of course nonsensical without resort to the supernatural. The founders are Christians and diests, for the most part, so natural law fits within that framework. It has no relevence in a post-religion world.
Literally every business that relies on any kind of stock, real estate, or other form of property depends on the government for the security of that property. Yes, their survival depends - in part - on providing a decent product or service at an acceptable price, but it also depends on having the backing of a state that can inflict serious, life-changing harm on the Takers who have no regard for reciprocity, who will simply grab whatever they want with no recompense whatsoever, and who will continue doing so until they are physically thrown in jail.
These people aren't a majority. Heck, they aren't even a significant minority. But they're common enough to make the difference between profit and loss in any remotely competitive business.
Anarcho-libertarians are loath to admit this, but civilization depends of putting these people behind bars, along with the murderers, rapists, kidnappers, forgers, fruadsters, and other thugs who cannot suppress their own desires reliably enough to behave with decency and reciprocity.
A respectable country will do everything it can to limit incarceration to those who pose genuine, active threats to the persons and property of others. It will not subject them to cruel or unusual punishment that goes beyond their removal from the free population. And it will do whatever is possible to rehabilitate them so they they can become functioning members of society.
But make no mistake - it will throw those fuckers into jail without remorse if they decide to steal instead of deal. In a country ruled by law, businesses can count on this protection. Indeed, it's what they bank on, which is why well-governed countries tend to be far more prosperous than those that tolerate pernicious criminality.
I hear a lot about "Well, find a new business model!", without explaining why a company should be forced to change based on clearly illegal activity.
This is begging the question. The activity is illegal in the first place because of lobbying by the recording industry starting in the late 1800s/early 1900s.
So if you start a startup, you're totally fine if I take your code, your logo, your copyrights, and your name and create a copycat site and take your customers? You're okay with that?
If so, please send me the details so I can keep an eye on you. Anyone else who's so inclined, reply as well. I'd love to grab a few zero-effort passive income generators.
Trademarks offer a lot more benefit to the consumer than any other IP. Allowing people to use other people's trademarks is like allowing you to use other people's signatures.
Everything else, I'm totally fine with. If you're better at using and marketing my code than I am, fork me over at will. Just don't pretend to be me.
edit: also, if you can exploit my code so much better than I can, consider hiring me. I'm cheap, I don't need a lot of space, and I'm extremely familiar with your codebase.
Conflating trademarks and copyrights is not going to help us come to a rational agreement on the appropriate nature of either one. There's also a considerable difference between commercial and personal infringement.
I support the use of trademarks to prevent consumer confusion; I don't support the abuse of trademarks (e.g. to attempt to suppress commentary, comparison, or criticism). I also support short-term copyrights for the benefit of authors, performers, and creators. I don't support the current system where copyrights can extend beyond 100 years.
Tell you what: if I still have legal control over and working backups of my startup's software 28 years from now, you can contact me and I'll send you a CC0-licensed copy of my most recent release as of this date (Apr. 25, 2013).
I think yours is a fair position (probably because it's close to my own:-). You are not rejecting the idea of IP as a compromise to encourage the production of goods that otherwise might not be created, you're just in favor of reining things in a lot.
Sometimes I still argue the side of the copyright abolitionists. This is for two reasons: first, it's nice to have extremists to expand the space that is considered "normal", and second, I'd rather have zero copyright than effectively perpetual copyright with outrageous penalties for personal infringement.
I am, actually. Of course my EULA will have some clause to the effect of "If you do this, you implicitly accept to go three rounds with me at a time and place of my choosing, including your house". I'll be sure to bring a ref along, of course.
Copyright has been around a lot longer than the late 1800's/early 1900's. And many, many people rely on it for their income, not just the recording industry. In fact, the entire software industry, pretty much. Does the recording industry lose protection because they're big?
Copyright was originally much shorter in duration, and did not cover phonographic recordings. I've lost the link, but I remember reading US senate hearings from the early 1900s in which phonograph producers were arguing against music publishers, basically following the same template you see the record labels using to argue against new technology today.
I was under the impression that the 'recording industry' as we understand it today was spawned in the 1960's as a response to the Beatles and their popularity.
Why should a law that has its roots in 17th century censorship continue to be clung to in the 21st century? Times have changed, get over it and develop a business model that is more appropriate for this century.
OK, sure: we have the same problem today that we had back then, which is the tendency of governments to descend into tyranny. The 4th amendment is a protection against that and so it remains relevant.
Copyright was began with an effort to simplify tyranny, and later evolved into a way to promote the interests of the publishing industry. Neither of those are relevant to today's world; we do not want the Star Chamber and the publishing industry is no longer necessary to spread information and entertainment. Why, then, should we keep copyright around?
"the publishing industry is no longer necessary to spread information and entertainment."
What's your real problem here? Are you smart but dishonest? Or are you just a complete idiot? Because there's no way an informed person of good will could say something as obviously wrong as that. Seriously, publishers do a hell of a lot more than just "spread" information an entertainment. They actually produce the goddamn stuff. Moreover, they do so by putting billions (with a b) at risk. And thank goodness for that, since producing top-flight media remains an insanely difficult, expensive, and risky thing to do.
And that's the reason copyright exists: to ensure when some of the bets these publishers place do turn into giant booming successes, they can actually recover enough of their investment to remain profitably engaged in the production business.
An an institution, copyright has problems galore, but as Churchill said of democracy "is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried."
Look back at what's happened to the music business since Napster for past lessons on what has and has not worked.
To say "a site who's sole purpose is enabling the illegal downloading" is not completely true. File sharing has more legitimate uses than illegal ones. See Dropbox for details.
Most Icelanders do not want to join the EU. The two political parties with the current greatest following which will probably be elected for a new government next Saturday also oppose joining the EU.
Didn't the EU give billions of Euros in handouts to the PIIGS?
They have unsustainable economies due to excessive public welfare programs and unfavorable demographics. Being outside the EU wouldn't magically solve those problems, though it would let them monetize some debt.
Yes the problems won't magically go away. "They have unsustainable economies due to excessive public welfare programs and unfavorable demographics" can be said about most countries.
But of course GDP growth y/y is sustainable ad infinitum.
Here in the USA, when we run out of money we can print some more and pass the cost to nations who use the USD in foreign exchange (Kudos for China and Australia for trying to get out of this hole). But in the EU, they have to appease the troika before they run some database queries. (And as we have seen with cyprus, now you also have to sell an arm and a leg, what's next?)
In the world where central banks are openly buying stock with their freshly minted database queries…what could go wrong?
It would be more likely to interfere with Iceland's connection to the world financial system, for example to burden that connection with regulatory hurdles or to even suspend it, than to use overt military force, because that strategy could be hidden from the average citizen of the aggressor, whereas an invasion would ultimately require an explanation and much political capital.
"[update: invasion in a sense as to coerce a country to achieve desired result by hook or by crook]"
That's not even close to invasion if that's what you meant. I really can't imagine that anyone would come close to invading Iceland just because they host a domain.
Yes, and they got sent right back home before they could spell the name of their employer.
And the supreme court just trashed Mastercard for denying service to Wikileaks and its payment provider, DataCell. The verdict includes daily fines that would amount to 2.5 million dollars a year if they choose to continue denying services. (800k ISK daily fines = 292 million ISK yearly ~ 2.54 million USD)
I have high hopes for my country, and I know I'll be the first to go protest if they try to shut it down. Also, The Pirate Bay and file sharing in general has HUGE public support and the response in icelandic media has been nothing but positive, with responses from SMAIS (the icelandic version of RIAA/MPAA) being ridiculed and mocked.
I meant no disrespect to Iceland :-). Everything I hear makes it sound like a fantastic place. I was only pointing out that other countries, like the US, don't always share the same definition of "fantastic," and will exert pressure from all sides on countries that don't conform to their will.
I agree that an aggressor is unlikely to invade Iceland for resolving The Pirate Bay domain, but there remains the possibility for all states that a farcical reason is used to obfuscate the real reason for an invasion.
