yetAnotherUser

The cases where large companies do win won't make news though. "Large companies settles with individual" isn't really headline material now, is it?

Also, small companies != people. Neither me nor you are a company and even small companies have significantly more resources available to them than someone who just created the next Lord of the Rings and didn't see a penny.

There are significantly more companies who would rather start killing politicians than see IP law gone. They rake in billions of shareholder value, much moreso than any AI company out there.

I never argued that copyright law is necessarily wrong or bad just because we went millenia without it. What I am arguing is that these laws do not allow people to create intellectual works as people in the past were no less artistic than we are today - maybe even moreso.

Have you seen the impact of IP law on science? It's horrible. No researcher sees any money from their works - rather they must pay to lose their "rights" and have papers published. Scientific journals have hampered scientific progress and will continue to do so for as long as IP law remains. I would not be surprised if millions of needless deaths could have been prevented if only every medical researcher had access to research.

IP law serves solely large companies and independent artists see a couple of breadcrumbs. Abolishing IP law - or at the very least limiting it to a couple of years at most - would have hardly any impact on small artists. The vast, vast, VAST majority of artists make hardly any money already. Just check Bandcamp or itch.io and see how many millions of artists there are who will never ever see success. They do not benefit from IP law - so why should we keep it for the top 0.1% of artists who do?

The rich want to do it because of AI. That's it.

They can already take whatever you create wihout giving you a dime. What are you gonna do, sue a multi-billion dollar company with a fleet of attorneys on standby? With what money?

They would certainly just settle and give you a pittance just about large enough to cover your attorney fees.

Do you know why companies usually don't do this? Because they have sufficiently many people hired who do nothing but create stories for the company full time. They do not need your ideas.

Copyright didn't exist for millenia. It didn't stop authors from writing books.

Not quite. Immigrants intend to stay forever, while expats don't (in my opinion).

That is, if these self-called "expats" do intend to stay forever and obtain citizenship they very much are immigrants who don't want to call themselves immigrants.

Chambers, who has lived in Thailand for years, specializes in studying the influence of the Thai military, which plays a prominent role in the nation's politics.

This is the sole reason for the arrest. Besides, why are you arguing someone who has lived in a country for years is just a guest?

Not quite. Reuploading is at the very least an annoying process.

Uploading anything over Tor is a gruelling process. Downloading takes much time already, uploading even more so. Most consumer internet plans aren't symmetrically either with significantly lower upload than download speeds. Plus, you need to find a direct-download provider which doesn't block Tor exit nodes and where uploading/downloading is free.

Taking something down is quick. A script scraping these forums which automatically reports the download links (any direct-download site quickly removes reports of CSAM by the way - no one wants to host this legal nightmare) can take down thousands of uploads per day.

Making the experience horrible leads to a slow death of those sites. Imagine if 95% of videos on [generic legal porn site] lead to a "Sorry! This content has been taken down." message. How much traffic would the site lose? I'd argue quite a lot.

I'd be surprised if many "producers" are caught. From what I have heard, most uploads on those sites are reuploads because it's magnitudes easier.

Of the 1400 people caught, I'd say maybe 10 were site administors and the rest passive "consumers" who didn't use Tor. I wouldn't put my hopes up too much that anyone who was caught ever committed child abuse themselves.

I mean, 1400 identified out of 1.8 million really isn't a whole lot to begin with.

It doesn't though.

The most effective way to shut these forums down is to register bot accounts scraping links to the clearnet direct-download sites hosting the material and then reporting every single one.

If everything posted to these forums is deleted within a couple of days, their popularity would falter. And victims much prefer having their footage deleted than letting it stay up for years to catch a handful of site admins.

Frankly, I couldn't care less about punishing the people hosting these sites. It's an endless game of cat and mouse and will never be fast enough to meaningfully slow down the spread of CSAM.

Also, these sites don't produce CSAM themselves. They just spread it - most of the CSAM exists already and isn't made specifically for distribution.

They can do so currently by making a couple of minor changes and settling for a pittance because your lawsuit would bankrupt you.

"Chaos" is a better system than one benefitting corporations only.

Those are the results from the 2024 European Parliament Election.

Here are the results of the more relevant 2023 State Parliament Election:

The state government is right-wing conservatives with centrist-at-best "social" democrats. Both are very supportive of police cracking down on people who wouldn't have voted for them anyways.

Berlin is run by right-wing conservatives, not liberals. The federal government lacks authority for states deciding whom to deport.

It's perfectly legal to compress something to a single bit and publish it.

Hell, if I take and publish the average color of any copyrighted image that is at least 24 bits. That's lossy compression yet legal.