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Another person who I remember really coming out as a villain in that era was Gene Simmons from KISS: "Sue everybody. Take their homes, their cars."[1]

[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2010/10/kiss-frontman-we...

It's even more egregious after watching interviews of a young Lars bragging about trading bootleg cassette tapes.

IIRC, Dave Grohl actually gave a lot of shit to Metallica, claiming that it would be one thing if this were some indie band selling cassettes having their music stolen, but it's another when multi-millionaires are crying that they aren't getting extra money.

Found it: https://youtu.be/Yy45qY9c49k

Killed Napster and forced them overseas to create one of the most toxic streaming platforms for music the world has ever seen. Spotify. Sean Parker used to be cool…

how they were able to recover from that is beyond me.

I still can't listen to a Metallica song on the radio without feeling a bit sour. I wasn't a die hard superfan or anything, but their songs were pretty good. It really didn't help that they had cultivated this tough guy image and then turned into total whiners about piracy.

Not that surprising considering that James Hetfield has no qualms about his music being used for literal torture.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/jun/19/usa.guantanamo

"Napster bad!", classic

People could always simply argue in court that their torrenting was free use.

If you're just some nobody representing yourself instead of an expensive lawyer acting on behalf of a large company, maybe the judge will even try to be extra nice when he explains why the argument doesn't hold water.

Of course not. It is just yet another example of a 7-8 figure expensive attorney and their billions dollar corporation wasting everyone' time, tax payers dollars, and demonstrating that the law applies to us and not them. I expect them to just stop showing up in court in time. What can the court do when these people own the people that write the laws?

> It's an absurd sight, like a bad trip.

Do you say the same thing about being required to wear pants in public?

Agreed that the extreme it has been taken to is absurd and entirely counterproductive though. 20-ish years was already a long time. If it takes you more than 20 years to market your book perhaps people just don't really like it all that much?

I rather doubt this more laissez-faire attitude towards intellectual property will be extended to those without.

Furthermore, in most copyright lawsuits that nerds like us actually care about (i.e. ones involving service providers and not actual artists or publishers), the number of works infringed is so high that the judge can just work backwards from the desired damage award and never actually hit the statutory damages cap. If the statutory damages limit was actually reached in basically any intermediary liability case, we'd be talking about damage awards higher than the US GDP.

Linear arithmetic is one hell of a drug.

> NOTE: it is per "work infringed", not per infringement. The number of infringements will be one of the factors the court will consider when deciding where in that $750-30000 range to go.

But that's the whole problem, isn't it? Consider how a P2P network operates. There are N users with a copy of the song. From this we know that there have been at most N uploads, for N users, so the average user has uploaded 1 copy. Really slightly less than 1, since at least one of them had the original so there are N-1 uploads and N users and the average is (N-1)/N.

There could be some users who upload more copies than others, but that only makes it worse. If one user in three uploads three copies and the others upload none, the average is still one but now the median is zero -- pick a user at random and they more likely than not haven't actually distributed it at all.

Meanwhile the low end of the statutory damages amount is 750X the average, which is why the outcome feels absurd -- because it is.

Consider what happens if 750 users each upload one copy of a $1 song. The total actual damages are then $750, but the law would allow them to recover a minimum of $750 from each of them, i.e. the total actual damages across all users from each user. The law sometimes does things like that where you can go after any of the parties who participated in something and try to extract the entire amount, but it's not that common for obvious reasons and the way that usually works is that you can only do it once -- if you got the $750 from one user you can't then go to the next user and get another $750, all you should be able to do is make them split the bill. But copyright law is bananas.

> the RIAA suits were not for downloading

They were not all the same, some were fairly complicated cases, and one was undoubtedly for distribution.

`The court’s instructions defined “reproduction” to include “[t]he act of downloading copyrighted sound recordings on a peer-to-peer network.”'

From:

https://cases.justia.com/federal/appellate-courts/ca8/11-282...

'Same thing', hah. This was edited out, but I'm quoting it anyway:

> I should trot out all of the justifications here.

I'll start: personal use instead of profit. Certainly a difference, not convinced justification is required or even advisable.

Children are afforded more lenience in sane societies (before the law and in social contexts) because they are still developing and not as well socialized/experienced as adults. I assume most pro-piracy people support personal use and not commercial use of content.

We support copyright reform not piracy. The reason we do is because corporate giants have weaponized the system for their own ends and not for our useful promotion of the arts and sciences.

So.. I don't think it's appropriate for billion dollar companies to abuse copyrighted authored material for their own profit streams. They have the money. They can either pay or not use the material.

A child stole a candy bar from my shop, time to bankrupt his whole working class family!

^ sociopathic legalists really do think this way.

Oh stop being disingenuous.

Did you even read the title of the article? This is exactly what they are claiming is fair use.

seeding is not the only way you actually upload

you're uploading before seeding, and i'm willing to bet Meta weren't seeding but, as they correctly stated in that regard, they're sharing even when they try their best not to because of the way the protocol works as zero-upload is typically impractical for any significant size files

some trackers will additionally penalise you for not sharing file parts, but this depends on the tracker

> So do we now roll back all of the previous copyright cases where downloading music with bittorrent has been prosecuted

No, because those cases were pirating-while-poor. This is pirating-while-trillion-dollar-corporation, which falls under a completely different section of the law.

From my understanding, Meta's use of the pirated book was accepted as fair use and the plaintiffs admitted to no harm. In the case of pirated music and films, neither of those points are made. Copyright holders assume people who pirate would have bought the content, usually even assuming that one download is one lost sale. And I am not aware of a single case where watching or listening to pirated content was accepted as fair use.

It is interesting to follow how this plays out for Meta and how that will impact future cases.

I'm going to need a copy of your latest bank statement before i can accurately answer that.

As far as I know, setting upload speed to zero disables the limit. You can set it to be very low but not zero.

> Different activists are different. "Information wants to be free" activists are against different things from "artists trying to make an honest living" activists.

...uhhh, I mean, maybe my perspective is skewed because I largely run in bluegrass/deadhead circles, but the venn diagram of these two seems to be nearly a circle.

https://pickipedia.xyz/wiki/DRM-free

People would care if Meta is allowed to torrent from Nintendo and they aren’t, because they’d care if Meta bought licenses from Nintendo and open models couldn’t get those licenses.

How does that money get distributed? If I create a film, how they decide if I’m worthy enough to receive some of that money?

Why is it fair that you get to be subsidized by everyone who does pay? Imagine a world where everyone had the same attitude as you and did not pay for any media. Pirates get to pirate only because most people don’t. So why are you so special?

Spain too; but legally sharing books and media without profit it's allowed.

Still, they should pay me in order to listen all the mediocre music and crappy 'best sellers' they often produce. More than often I'd just buy some indie book from a small publisher which has much better stories than the whole mainstream.

Heck; every time I try to read some Spaniard technotriller it justs sucks because they focus on crappy emotions everytime focusing near nil on scientific facts or tecnological backgrounds. If any, of course. Hello, Gómez Jurado with the Red Queen sagas.

Meanwhile, people writting half-fantasy/half-geopolitics fiction such as Fabián Plaza with its book depicting a paranormal Cold War were the Spanish Francoist regime never ended and the USSR took the whole Germany for itself, you will get more enganing books. The hippies in Woodstock summoned magical Lovecraftian monsters and the CIA/KGB among paranormal agencies try to fight these. The even mention Orgonic fields and tons of American floklore on paranormal experiments from the CIA/USSR. We all know it's actual bullshit but it's documented bullshit. Modulo the magic, the author applied as a diplomat for Spain a few decades ago so he knows how to create a thriller by predicting how the characters will behave psichologically much better than the Gómez Jurado's books creating an Aspie Mary Sue character getting aspull skills.

The mainstream alternative? Some Humanities woman as the maincharacter alleging bullshit 'prime number finding' in order to boost IQ as a goverment experiment against another high IQ psychopath.

The media in Spain sucks because Spain arrived late to a scientifical mindset socially -thanks, Francoist /s- and male/female Humanities people dominate both the press and the literary world. Instead of Gideon Crew like books (which are a bit bullshit, but with a bit of realism too) like sagas, we get drama bound thrillers with no actual research; if any, hidden Apple product placements.

You would say, heck, Dan Brown it's the same and Tom Clancy's novels are a joke against the ones from actually versed people throwing stereotypes away because they did a good research (the US is not just a bigger Texas and Spain is not a big Andalusia), but that's not the issue here.

The matter it's that most of the readers in Spain are women, and somehow they are afraid of reading a thriller with less drama and emotions and more action (action women do exist you know) and resolution and developing actual skills o the spot instead of aspulling them.

Just look at text adventures. Anchorhead it's just a modern Lovecraft retelling but it has a female protagonist and you as the player should drive her solving all the ingame puzzles. If something like that existed in 1998, the Spaniard should be able to write tons of interesting media (books and series) where crimes were not solved with people just happening to be in the right spot at some specific time. That's a cheap writting and an obvious neglection to the reader allowing him to join the proofs together.

LLMs make pirated art more accessible, and 2005 pirates allegedly harmed artists by decreasing their sales.

The significant change is that 2025 corpo pirates are big corporations, and 2005 personal pirates are individuals. And I think the larger issue is that the big corpo pirates get away with what 2025 personal pirates wouldn’t.

Anyways, my opinion is that we should get rid of IP, but only with a replacement that ensures creators still get paid. I lean towards piracy being a small sin: immoral, but you can easily be a pirate and still overall moral person.

2005 piracy had little to do to with making art accessible. For the most part it seemed more like getting for free the digital things we couldn't pay or and/or felt entitled to, with many justifications layered on top.

You're probably both right since activists are not a consistent monolith.

Probably only if you are giving "back to Humanity" or something like that? :-D

but if i'm Facebook, can't i pay thousands books?

Right problem, wrong solution. You can't build something that doesn't bend to power, by definition. You have to take away the power.

Ordinary piracy would still be illegal since it's not for AI training.