The Pirate Bay: a link is just a link
p2pnet news view Freedom | P2P:- I had to send a fax to a US university recently on behalf of my daughter, and I realised that not only do I not own a fax machine, I have never owned a fax machine.
During the 1990’s I would occasionally approach one of these mysterious devices, a sheet of paper in hand ready to be fed into the slot and transmitted through some mysterious method to other parts of the world, but it was clearly the devil’s work.
I never wanted one of the infernal devices in my home, and it has been wonderful to see emailed attachments replace them for most uses, apart from the odd recalcitrant academic institution.
The recent advent of on-demand video streaming of the main terrestrial TV channels has made me realise that I may never get round to acquiring a PVR, a hard-drive based TV recorder, before they too are swept away in the flood of technological innovation. Farewell, then Sky+ box, I hardly knew thee.
One of the technologies that makes PVRs redundant is of course BitTorrent, the distributed file-sharing protocol that allows very large files to be split into large numbers of relatively small chunks that can be scattered over thousands or indeed millions of co-operative hosts all over the internet, where they are tracked and reassembled at will by software like the open source Miro player.
Thanks to BitTorrent multi-megabyte presentations, home videos and recordings of one’s children singing can easily be made available without the need to invest in large servers, high speed internet connections or generous bandwidth allowances.
BitTorrent is a transformative technology, and the peer-to-peer delivery of content it offers has inspired many imitators, one of which powers BBC iPlayer downloads. While some internet service providers are unhappy with BitTorrent because the cumulative impact of its millions of happy users can occasionally degrade their network performance it is safe, reliable and completely legal.
While the technology may be legal, however, many of the files which it is used to distribute contain unlicensed copies of copyrighted material, with songs, videos, films and software that were never intended for release by their owners.
One consequence of this is that any website which indexes the tracker files that are used to note where the many small parts that make up a single BitTorrent file will inevitably enable its users to locate lots of unlicensed material and, since the tracker file is all that is needed to download that material, it could lead to the breach of copyright that any download implies.
This is the chain of reasoning that dragged the team who run PirateBay, the Swedish website that has become one of the world’s largest BitTorrent indexes, in front of a court earlier this week charged with assisting copyright infringement and assisting making available copyright material.
It needs to be pointed out very clearly that neither PirateBay nor any of the other torrent tracking sites have infringing content on their servers. You can’t download Quantom of Solace from www.thepiratebay.org, but you can find many places that will tell you what you need to know to do so.
Early in the trial the first set of charges were dropped, implying that the court has realised that simply pointing to someone else’s infringing material does not help them in the act of infringement, but the serious charges still remain.
It is possible that Gottfrid Svartholm , Fredrik Neij and Peter Sunde will face fines or prison sentences and the site will be closed down, although it seems unlikely that even the combined weight of the music industry can persuade a Swedish court to restrict freedom of expression to this extent.
The Pirate Bay case hinges on what counts as infringement, and whether simply linking to a site is enough to make someone liable, treating a hypertext link to a third-party URL as an endorsement, as something that makes a connection between two web pages or information sources that has real legal significance and weight.
Yet it is nothing of the sort. Ever since Tim Berners-Lee defined the Hypertext Markup Language and its Uniform Resource Locators one fundamental thing has applied – a link is just a link.
As time has gone by we have seen that this simple-minded approach is not enough, and the work currently going on to define and implement the ’semantic web’ is to a great extent about providing mechanisms for assigning values to links, so that I can find links that ‘approve’ of the item linked to, links that ‘deprecate’ it and perhaps even links that ‘deny’ what is being said at the other end.
As things stand a link from one page to another is simply a connection, and does not imply any specific intention. Yet lawyers representing the content industry and politicians scared of the shift in the balance of power the internet represents are trying very hard to ensure that the legal system ignores the technical reality and imposes a commercially and politically useful reading.
As part of his contribution to the philosophy of language the great Cambridge philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein noted (PI §43) that ‘the meaning of a word is its use in the language’.
Perhaps we need a ‘philosophy of linkage’ to explore what the use of a link can signify, before the lawyers decide it for us and limit the creative potential of the web through their lack of imagination and understanding.
Bill Thompson – andfinally.com
[Thompson is a UK-based writer and broadcaster. He has a weekly column on the BBC WebWise site, and contributes both on and off-line to The Guardian, The Register and The New Statesman, among others. His "inappropriately-titled 'billblog' "appears weekly on BBC News Online in the technology news section.]
February , 2009
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February 20th, 2009 at 3:35 pm
what the hell is ‘assisting copyright infringement’, is this made up? has to be. and didn’t a Judge already prove that ‘making available’ isn’t copyright infringement?
from a technical standpoint, its amazing the techno-stupid shit these asshats vomit out in an attempt to get another asshat judge to believe.
make the dumbasses PROVE unlicensed distribution, (something they have admitted to being impossible).
and who actually gives a fsck that Bono is pissed, I for one am glad. P2P isn’t going anywhere, deal with it.
stw
February 20th, 2009 at 3:39 pm
âassisting copyright infringementâ:
-A person who works in a photocopier shop
-A person who sends a fax for someone (Secretary)
-Jon allowing someone to post a link to a copyright newspaper link
These are all examples of âassisting copyright infringementâ. And all are guilty.
February 20th, 2009 at 4:03 pm
hahahah, ok. then I do alot of ‘assisting’.
February 20th, 2009 at 4:18 pm
-Google
-Game Console Modifications
-CDR’s
-DVR’s
-VCR’s
-CD Burners
-Stereos with a record function
-Youtube
-The whole internet
-Anyone who works for, or supplies any of the above
February 20th, 2009 at 4:32 pm
-word of mouth referring to existing copyrighted material
-thoughts consistent with existing copyrighted material
-written words similiar to existing copyrighted material
-dreams of ideas that are already copyrighted
-humming a tune that is similiar to an existing copyrighted material
February 20th, 2009 at 4:43 pm
yup, you got it.
You now know, “what the hell âassisting copyright infringementâ is”.
:p
February 20th, 2009 at 7:15 pm
“…and didnât a Judge already prove that âmaking availableâ isnât copyright infringement?”
Unfortunately, that’s only in America as far as I know. Hence, these corporate shitheads are gonna keep pushing this one everywhere else (and to some degree in America too despite this ruling, it seems).
February 20th, 2009 at 7:20 pm
Surfer Wrote:
“what the hell is âassisting copyright infringementâ, is this made up? has to be. and didnât a Judge already prove that âmaking availableâ isnât copyright infringement?”
It’s not even making available which implies that you are offering or potentially allow access to copyrighted material. “Assisting” is such broad accusation that is can cover almost anything. Google could easily be charged with the same act, because it links to copyrighted material; you don’t see them suing google do you? that’s because (1) they are extremely wealthy and have an army of lawyers who would rip apart their unsubstantiated and quite possibly not existent claims, and (2) They don’t want to risk setting a bad precedent.
The pirate bay neither hosts or aids in the distribution of copyrighted materials, that is performed chiefly by the users of the tracker. Just as ISPs enjoy a conduit limited liability so should the piratebay. “Assisting” and “Facilitating” “Copyright Theft” as the copyright industry terms it, is a specious attempt to circumvent the established legislation that requires the burden of evidential distribution.
February 20th, 2009 at 7:25 pm
The internet is nothing if not a vast copy machine. Doesn’t matter if it is copyrighted or not. If a photographer or a news site wants to show you an image that is copyrighted, guess what. They got to pass it through the browser. Your machine makes a copy of the existing digital work in order for you to see it.
This is what makes so bogus claims like, “well, it was in your RAM memory for 1/10th of a second so you can display and record logs”. Hello…. What isn’t mentioned in that little tidbit, is that there is no software I know of capable of pulling out that temporary flash of RAM holding as it passes through and then disappears off into where ever electrons go. And such a case was made and agreed to by a court to obtain logs of users to ISOhunt I think it was.
On one end you got the copyright forces just chomping at the bit because horror of horrors someone got a 1/10 of a second recording of one of their precious bits and bytes. Yet no one stops to think that the whole banana went or the net don’t function. Now you can not have a digital store selling material, without copying going on. You can’t view a newspaper or any copyrighted image without copying happening.
Under present US law, at the moment of creation, a work is automatically granted copyright. So under those terms, this post could well under any other setting be termed to have a default copyright. Which when it comes down to it, is assine. Just because I take a moment to type out a bunch of strung together words, or music notes for that matter does not make it valuable enough to hold copyright. Nor can most websites really IMHO be termed to be worthy of copyright, just because they exist.
So now that you got this huge copymachine throwing bits and bytes around the world, you can’t have it both ways. Not only do laws vary from country to country but so does basic value as far as content goes. You and I know that some tweet isn’t on par with the words of some Nobel prize winner writing about his field of profession. That doesn’t mean the Nobel author’s writings are worthy of copyright. Yet if it is put on the net, it is likely you can obtain your very own copy simply by viewing it.
So when you get to the nut cutting, Microsoft is just as guilty as Google for assisting copyright infringement, if TPB is. Yet for some very strange reason, even though I can place my search terms in a manner that shows only torrents of copyrighted works, copyrighted images, or copyrighted programs, neither of the first two do we hear anything like this farce going on at present.
February 21st, 2009 at 1:32 am
You always have the most well written and thought out posts RW. I appreciate it, a lot!
February 23rd, 2009 at 2:22 am
RW: Well said.
A musing: Guns don’t kill people, people kill people. – Links don’t infringe copyright, people infringe copyright.
Is it just me or are they trying to prove the latter statement wrong? And by all accounts if they can prove it wrong would it not make the former statement come under scrutiny as well… I know this has been simplified a ton and more but still. I don’t know why but I feel guns and BT are pretty much alike.
Guns can be used for home protection and keeping yourself safe. Guns can also be used to kill and terrorize people.
BT can be used for spreading Linux distros and other works. BT can also be used to download copyrighted material.
Monday mornings may not be the best time for thoughts like this. Pretty odd logic.