Sympathies to Phara et al, but like this makes any fucking difference to anyone…

Don’t the Feds/MAFFIAAA whoever they are ever get bored of pissing in the wind? What do you ever achieve other than getting wet and stinking of your own piss?

When Icefilms gets shut down, as it eventually will, there’s QSS, and tons of others. Then there will be more. Then there’s usenet. Then there’s private FTP servers. Then, failing all of that, there’s always good old burning DVDs, like in the old days, and popping them in the mail. You lot will NEVER win. What the people want, the people WILL get. If you don’t understand or believe this I suggest you read a little history.

Bravo for putting your name here, but remember, people are apt to use your name for various uses themselves. I just come here for the debates personally. It’s good to help sharpen your own wit by pointing out flaws in disingenuous arguments. Welcome to Torrentfreak, hope you enjoy your stay. :)

First off, I know nothing about Phara herself, except that the criticism precedes her by a long, long way. I’ve never visited NinjaVideo, but even I’ve heard the complaints. Whether that’s due to very loud critics or very genuine issues, or both, I have no way of knowing.

On a more general level, on the one hand, I have to agree about much of the language here: I’ve never appreciated the racism, sexism, homophobia and general nastiness that often comes with an open, semi-anonymous forum like TorrentFreak. While I’ve largely given up on flagging most-such comments, I would prefer many of the obviously-deliberately-offensive ones to be removed, on the whole (including one or two of my own more-embarrassing drunken rants).

On the other hand, it’s an open, semi-anonymous forum. By definition, you’ll always get people abusing that – and I’d rather see that people on here have a clearly-visible right to free speech than see it over-moderated (either by the admins or by self-censoring users) into something universally inoffensive. The truth of any matter of any consequence – whichever viewpoint one cleaves to – is usually offensive to someone.

Such as your own comments about the UK, for example. Almost every country on Earth will have had its dark moments in history – including Britain, no question – but at this moment in time, it’s not the UK that’s using the threat of trade sanctions to force other countries into implementing harmful laws intended to overwhelmingly benefit US corporations at the expense of market competition and human rights.

Also, your apparent belief that only Brits are capable of posting offensively-worded posts is nothing short of bizarrely hypocritical: English is (for want of a better phrase) a lingua franca on much of the internet and while there is a strong British contingent on here, many of the more abusive diatribes are apparently by anons, who could be from almost anywhere in the world.

[slightly off-topic note: all non-Brits should be aware that in this country, the word "cunt" is used by many as a form of strong punctuation, in much the same way the term "mother-fucker" is used by many Americans]

“Make up whatever bullshit figures and lies you want to tell yourself” – this doesn’t seem to be either an articulate or an honest comment: as far as I’ve ever noticed, the figures most frequently quoted on TorrentFreak are those that come from the MPAA and RIAA themselves, who were far from shy about pulling essentially-fictitious “facts” on piracy from thin-air – and who’s agents didn’t hesitate to perjurously submit those “facts” to our own parliament under oath.

What’s more, of the relatively-few convincing, file-sharing-friendly studies seem to have been mostly written by pro-copyright academics and appear in most instances to derive heavily from information supplied by the MPAA and RIAA themselves and their working partners, such as retailers. None of these people and organisations appear to me to be trying to deceive the reader in a direction that favours file-sharing – or have anything obviously to gain from such a deception.

As for the amount that movies cost to make… quite frankly, fuck ‘em. I’m not going to get upset about hypothetical losses when the MPAA themselves have publically declared Hollywood’s combined profits to be at least $100,000,000,000 per annum, a figure which is higher than the GDPs for well over two-thirds of the individual countries on this planet, as listed by the IMF.

If they can’t evolve and survive with those resources, then they don’t deserve to.

• Firstly, some measure of anonymity is a very wise defensive precaution on an open site like this one: no-one with any sense should want to risk being tracked down and prank-called endlessly by random anons looking for laughs.

• Further, speaking from a British perspective, being entirely innocent of any crime in the UK is no barrier to harrassment and abuse from organisations such as FACT: they are more than happy to lie through their teeth to our local police and courts in order to trigger home-destroying raids, arrests for non-existent criminal conspiracies and drawn-out legal proceedings lasting several years.

This has already happened a number of times here – and this is without even considering the latest wheeze of ICE using a post-9/11 anti-terrorist agreement to try and bypass our laws entirely and extradite one young man for something that’s already been established in the high court as legal in the UK.

According to the Media Piracy in Emerging Economies study, these tactics of using legal procedures as mechanisms of abuse in themselves are a normal strategy for anti-piracy groups throughout the world.

Given the amount of money behind them (with the resulting endless run of expensive appeals), coupled with their usual tactic of only attacking the easiest and poorest targets they can find, it’s highly unlikely that they’ll ever face justice for their often blatantly-illegal activities.

• Most seriously, anonymity is something to be valued and used as a simple matter of principle. Many governments – including the US government at the moment – seem all but determined to eradicate rights to privacy throughout the world.

Whether we’re discussing anti-terrorism laws in Europe, copyright in the USA or the suppression of political dissent in China, civil rights have always been inconvenient for governments. As opportunities to abridge or eradicate privacy rights do present themselves, there are many governments in the west – the USA included – that will almost certainly take them.

Unless you particularly want to risk effectively-unaccountable national and local government bureaucrats gaining a legal right to undetectably access the cams in your kids’ laptops and ‘phones to watch them getting undressed at night, you may want to ask yourself if you really think this is a good idea.