What was it the head of the danish Ifpi crowed so happily? Ah, yes…”Child Pornography Is Great.” he said.

All in all I recall being quite surprised the papers didn’t make more of that somewhat tasteless statement.

What was it the head of the danish Ifpi crowed so happily? Ah, yes…”Child Pornography Is Great.” he said.

All in all I recall being quite surprised the papers didn’t make more of that somewhat tasteless statement.

It’s perfectly legal to create a perfect copy of a BMW and use it as you like as long as you don’t try to pass it off as a genuine BMW. Which is the example worth mentioning where copyright infringement is concerned.

Your example bears no relation at all to copying – more like someone hacking a database who makes a copy for himself and then burns the database down so he’s now the only one who can access it.

Here’s news. Copying media – even if you distribute it – has absolutely no relationship at all to burglary or grand theft auto.

The same way you can’t really compare fragging someone in an online game with the physical act of shooting someone in the head in real life. This should be obvious. Apparently not.

Now that is solid reasoning. May i say that debates such as these are few and far between. I’d like to pitch in a cent or two of my own here.

What you are fearing – that game creation for instance may lose out – could very well turn out to be the case. So far everything that’s been adressed has been media created by single people – books, music, a slew of indie games and the odd movie. Or software in the case of the open source sector. Getting sufficiently many skilled people on board to recreate a full immersive video game today presents a logistical problem.

Not an insolveable one however. Crowdsourcing does work, we’ve seen that. Any game company today takes similar risks just by throwing out a title before they even have an inkling on whether it’ll sell or not. Or whether Bioware will toss something out the week after launch which puts the entire game on the back shelf for good.
For the record I’m also relatively optimistic – the most avid gamers i know are heavy-handed pirates. Strangely enough they are also the ones possessing the most complete coverage of legally bought game titles I’ve seen.

Or perhaps not so strange. Enthusiasts have never been shy about spending good time and money on their hobbies. The thousands who just download and play casually without caring usually wouldn’t have bought the game at all otherwise either, for one thing.

That, and…I’ve compared the “plain vanilla” version of the game “Oblivion” for the PS3 and compared it to the PC version after the game was rebuilt almost from scratch by an avid mob of modders – textures, engine patches, new quest and even campaign lines…more or less full rewrites.
In an age where the consumers spend more time rebuilding a game than the original manufacturer did creating it I somehow have a difficult time imagining a dearth of good games. The same way I find it impossible to reconcile the prevailing view John Q Doe has of the Linux operating system to the smooth operation of the latest ubuntu distro or the Android mobile OS.

One way or another though, the industry will have to adapt. As long as person A can communicate with person B there will be filesharing of similar magnitude to what we see today. Any industry which cannot cope or compete with this will have the same position as the blacksmith’s did right after the industrial revolution.

No, I won’t say what we advocate won’t cause damage. But from what i can see today the effects of stringent intellectual property laws do cause far more harm, on a greater scale and to far more people. And what I see the MPAA/RIAA and assorted other lobby companies pushing for is harmful in the extreme to everyone who even owns an internet connection.

Could I respect copyright with a sensible limitation? Well, yes. Creative commons has some good ideas there and for the sector of games and movies i could well imagine a reasonable time limit.

But honestly, I think it’s too late for that. Disney won’t stop extending the time limit on copyright (right now the extension suggested is life+95 years) nor will any other company which has built itself entirely around copyright. One side or the other has to fall. And i seriously doubt that will be “piracy”.

But that will still cost you and most of all in the overhead needed to take care of the things.

And we can already see the end of Moore’s law. Unless we come up with a new paradigm shift in material physics 10-15 nm will be the practical end scale of cpu’s. At which time if we still use electromagnetism to power it we might end up with computers which crash by the random noise of someone making a phone call nearby.

Yes, child porn distributors use TOR and other proxies and have done so for years. But that’s like saying that bolt cutters, crowbars and screwdrivers are preferable tools for use in burglary. If one person out of a hundred or even one person out of ten uses everyday tools for criminal purposes that isn’t a good enough reason to seriously attempt rendering the tool useless.

Mind you, It is a given that TOR’s anonymity will be broken if it is possible to do so. This is to be welcomed as that will pave the way for a better tool. If the anonymity is not practical to break then it will weather that test.

Well, it does, sort of. The difference being that I for quite personal reasons am by far less motivated when it comes to defending the rights of people to share and distribute information where that information by default needs to come as a direct result of sexual child abuse.

Now given your tone I’m fairly sure that you have absolutely no desire to actually maintain a debate about it but for the sake of argument…

A) Blocking a site whether it contains child porn or not does absolutely nothing to stop the distribution of the offending imagery. In general, if you do place child porn on a site then what awaits you is not site blocking but a knock on your door by a pair of decidedly unfriendly policemen.
B) Of course if you’ve been so dumb as to distribute evidence of children being raped then it is a quite proportionate response to start using directed wiretapping and surveillance in order to discover who the pictures originate from.
C) Neither of the above applies to mere copyright infringement as you cannot even draw a paralell in law between a child being raped and illegally copying/distributing media. And so, although you can make a case for directed surveillance of suspects in the one case you cannot do this in the other case.

I have no doubts as to your ability to present a working solution to whatever filtering approach is attempted at an ISP or network level.

I’m far more concerned with the knee-jerk reaction likely to hit the powers-that-would-be once they find that they have absolutely no control over what person A will communicate to person B.

I’m not particularly looking forward to a paradigm where the only people with reliable internet access will be the ones travelling by darknet.