Comment

Comment by Gary on February 27, 2013 at 6:54am

Is making a copy of a book in the library stealing. Of course I'm a nut that thinks all information be free and readily available including the salaries of everyone in the US. I always come back to the Catholic Churches fight against Gutenburg in a claim that they had copywrite of the Bible of course in hindsight maybe we would have been better off if they had won.

Comment by East Dallas Matt on February 19, 2013 at 1:51pm

Have you watched the movie?  The file sharers are didn't give themselves the name 'pirates', content creators started calling them pirates in an effort to vilify them.

Comment by GNU/Linux Asshole on February 16, 2013 at 8:37pm

I just realized why I was bothered by the way these kids made money, and I think I may have been irrational. It was a gut reaction to seeing parallels between The Pirate Bay and Facebook. Both are mediums for people to share, but there are some important differences. Facebook controls what people share while The Pirate Bay does not. Facebook practices surveillance, while The Pirate Bay seems to oppose it. The only thing left to bother me about The Pirate Bay is the fact that some people are sharing things that they've been asked not to share, but this is not the web site's fault. The users doing the sharing hold full responsibility.

The Pirate Bay is like a bridge that allows the transportation of data. An engineer who builds a bridge is not responsible for, say, the illegal firearms that might one day be transported across that bridge. So the kids who created The Pirate Bay are similarly not responsible for their users' illegal sharing.

Was it wrong that they profited by putting ads on their web site? If I'm to extend the bridge analogy, I guess it would be like putting billboards on the bridge. Is that wrong?