This. It's the kind of insanity that made t-shirts with 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 illegal.
True laws are the intersection of legal and technically enforceable.
And in lieu of a globally-monitored and controlled internet, that's going to be far short of "we don't like your reference to a reference to a reference of this thing."
I think technical people (including myself) tend to view legal systems as dumb machines that can be tricked into executing any possible permutation of their own rules, and this is how you get "clever" ideas like warrant canaries.
Laws are precise, but unlike the rigid systems we work with, ultimately there is going to be human somewhere who can classify events into buckets like "horse shit" and "not horse shit"
It is a collision of a centralized top down hierarchical system designed by people with no skin in the game v/s highly decentralized and evolving networked system with lots of people with skin in the game. Former are destined to be sore losers.
Warrant canaries are valuable even if they don't have a legal basis. A canary might not fail, and if it does fail it invites a massive media storm about being forced to directly lie.
If they can compel your silence on the original matter, thus necessitating the warrant canary, why can't they compel your silence on being forced to update the warrant canary?
If warrant canaries were ever a real threat, what's to stop them from simply deciding that the only legal direct or indirect answer to "have you ever received a super duper secret subpoena" is "no comment".
The issue is not whether or not the concept of secret access to my data is just, it's whether or not you can actually play silly games with the party literally writing the rules to the game you're trying to play.
> If they can compel your silence on the original matter, thus necessitating the warrant canary, why can't they compel your silence on being forced to update the warrant canary?
For a while, but not forever and in every case.
> If warrant canaries were ever a real threat, what's to stop them from simply deciding that the only legal direct or indirect answer to "have you ever received a super duper secret subpoena" is "no comment".
I think a lot of people would immediately break that law in protest. It would be interesting, to say the least.
Best i can tell, it is not about getting an end verdict. It is about having the site taken down while being investigated.
For many, the mere threat for legal wrangling is enough to scuttle them as they can't afford the outage.
There have been at least one instance of someone getting their blog domain seized by the FBI because they were using .com, even though what they were hosting were MP3s the artists themselves had asked to be distributed, and neither the server nor the author were US based. RIAA had basically raised a stink and one day the domain was redirected to a FBI warning page.
While you might be right in normal circumstances, once the legal system tries to make humanly-intuitive decisions about the mathematical processes inside real "dumb machines", that legal system really should trigger exceptions or result in undefined behaviour.
Already, legal notions like jurisdiction are being pushed to their limits thanks to technology like the internet (look at the extradition case of Kim Dotcom), and things get even murkier with questions of copyright.
What is the difference between a forum (such as Reddit) where people can discuss magnet links/hashes (to news articles, and public domain works, and copyrighted works) and a forum called The Pirate Bay? If it's just the word "Pirate" in the title (as opposed to "The irate Bay", for example), then it seems that the law is very sensitive to single byte changes on a website, and the job of humans to classify these things into buckets rapidly becomes intractable.
I need to create a script or keyboard shortcut that just automatically pastes "The law is not a dumb automaton that can be fooled with your 'clever hacks'" on HN threads about anything in the legal sphere.
That would not be wise since it would not be true. The law is written by dumb people and executed by autocratic bureaucrats with a career wish.
Ironically, it's not just pirates applying "clever hacks" - in fact, it's mostly anti-piracy outfits who do but when they do it we call it legal engineering. Both legal engineering and clever hacks eventually result in updated or new legislation.
On both occasions, law is effectively written by the willing and not so much by democratic entities and the rule of law in general.
Come on now, that's not the same. Intending to distribute copyrighted content and having someone post a link on your site are two completely different things. Both from a legal and social perspective.
"Pirate Bay may finally be sunk after EU copyright ruling" -- As if we hadn't heard that a few times before. This ruling opens the doorway for blocking but if history is any evidence, it will 1) take some time before this turns into real blocks and, 2) technology will adjust accordingly.
They don't care what the courts say or think. They've had founders get in trouble before, the site kept going. The servers were seized, the site kept going.
And after this... well the site will still keep going. That will never stop. People will always keep running torrent sites, and there will likely always be people from The Pirate Bay who'd set up their own version/fork/whatever the second it goes down.
In other words, this court ruling will mean nothing for it. They didn't care before, and they probably won't care now either.
A number of the biggest torrent sites are down. Others are mere shadows (e.g. kickass). I would say the law in this case is winning, perhaps because there are so many streaming options now that the demand has dried up.
Let us toast to this great victory of the content-industry, with table-water (599 Spotify Downloads a glass). When i look around today, i see a lot of smiling faces. Those smiles, that bliss of total unawareness, that the state may have a interest in subsidied cheap bread and games, is what really keeps the game and movie industrie going.
Im proud to be here, and im proud to get paid this well to speak here.
Here is to you, great Pyrrhic, may we have many partys like this more.
And yet the Library Genesis mirrors are alive and well.
What's the difference? Is it simply the size of the downloads? (Ebooks are only a few megabytes, so a single hobbyist can easily mirror the whole library these days.)
book publishers don't typically make many millions of dollars that can be thrown away on litigation, i'd imagine. perhaps with the exception of academic journal publishers.
Textbook publishers (f*ck you, Pearson) also have the money for it, but they trend more towards single-use codes. Cuts down on resale and piracy in one stroke.
It seems more like the market is winning rather than the law. I pirate way way less now that netflix and hbonow are available. And when somebody creates a service for $15/mo that lets me stream live sports, I'll stop pirating those too.
This is fine for Americans, but because of increasingly sophisticated (and bizarrely aggressive[1]) VPN detection, it's not necessarily an option to people elsewhere.
No kidding. I can't even use Hurricane Electric IPv6 tunnels because Netflix thinks I'm trying to intentionally circumvent geolocks when I just want V6 support... sigh
Wasn't this to be expected, though? I'm no way near being a lawyer but, as I understand it, intent is quite important in law. If you design something with the intent of breaking a law, it makes sense that you should be liable.
That being said, I'm no supporter of copyright law, and I think whoever depends on owning information to generate an income will have a very limited life span (decades, at most), since they're essentially fighting against technology. The Pirate Bay is extremely simple technology (web page+BitTorrent), and after a decade of fighting I can still access it because I don't use my ISP's DNS servers -- just imagine how long the next innovation will take to suppress in court.
Intent is important, but mechanism is important too. If you're running a directory and doing nothing else that should not be illegal[1], even if your intent is causing the sun to explode.
[1] as far as contributory crimes go. A directory could directly violate something like privacy laws and it would be fine to take that down.
I can buy VHS tapes at Goodwill for $.49 a movie. Oddly enough, this price being essentially free, means that my time spent watching the movie is the real price. I wind up not watching them because they are not worth my time.
A colleague watches everything with Thai subtitles. This works great as his girlfriend is Thai. By everything I mean everything. Pirate Bay is hard work by comparison, as is a real DVD. I think that the warez game has moved on for serious movie watchers.
36 comments
[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 118 ms ] threadTrue laws are the intersection of legal and technically enforceable.
And in lieu of a globally-monitored and controlled internet, that's going to be far short of "we don't like your reference to a reference to a reference of this thing."
Laws are precise, but unlike the rigid systems we work with, ultimately there is going to be human somewhere who can classify events into buckets like "horse shit" and "not horse shit"
If warrant canaries were ever a real threat, what's to stop them from simply deciding that the only legal direct or indirect answer to "have you ever received a super duper secret subpoena" is "no comment".
The issue is not whether or not the concept of secret access to my data is just, it's whether or not you can actually play silly games with the party literally writing the rules to the game you're trying to play.
For a while, but not forever and in every case.
> If warrant canaries were ever a real threat, what's to stop them from simply deciding that the only legal direct or indirect answer to "have you ever received a super duper secret subpoena" is "no comment".
I think a lot of people would immediately break that law in protest. It would be interesting, to say the least.
For many, the mere threat for legal wrangling is enough to scuttle them as they can't afford the outage.
There have been at least one instance of someone getting their blog domain seized by the FBI because they were using .com, even though what they were hosting were MP3s the artists themselves had asked to be distributed, and neither the server nor the author were US based. RIAA had basically raised a stink and one day the domain was redirected to a FBI warning page.
Already, legal notions like jurisdiction are being pushed to their limits thanks to technology like the internet (look at the extradition case of Kim Dotcom), and things get even murkier with questions of copyright.
What is the difference between a forum (such as Reddit) where people can discuss magnet links/hashes (to news articles, and public domain works, and copyrighted works) and a forum called The Pirate Bay? If it's just the word "Pirate" in the title (as opposed to "The irate Bay", for example), then it seems that the law is very sensitive to single byte changes on a website, and the job of humans to classify these things into buckets rapidly becomes intractable.
We're back to "What Colour are your bits?" again: http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23
They don't care what the courts say or think. They've had founders get in trouble before, the site kept going. The servers were seized, the site kept going.
And after this... well the site will still keep going. That will never stop. People will always keep running torrent sites, and there will likely always be people from The Pirate Bay who'd set up their own version/fork/whatever the second it goes down.
In other words, this court ruling will mean nothing for it. They didn't care before, and they probably won't care now either.
What's the difference? Is it simply the size of the downloads? (Ebooks are only a few megabytes, so a single hobbyist can easily mirror the whole library these days.)
[1] - http://mobilesyrup.com/2015/04/22/hbo-says-it-will-terminate...
That being said, I'm no supporter of copyright law, and I think whoever depends on owning information to generate an income will have a very limited life span (decades, at most), since they're essentially fighting against technology. The Pirate Bay is extremely simple technology (web page+BitTorrent), and after a decade of fighting I can still access it because I don't use my ISP's DNS servers -- just imagine how long the next innovation will take to suppress in court.
[1] as far as contributory crimes go. A directory could directly violate something like privacy laws and it would be fine to take that down.
also, the story is still present on their UK website
https://arstechnica.co.uk/tech-policy/2017/06/pirate-bay-cop...