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Sunday, September 13th, 2015
| Time | Event |
| 8:27a | Is Running a Pirate Site Worse Than Stealing £8.5m From a Bank? This week Paul Mahoney, the former operator of streaming links site FastPassTV and discussion and linking forum BedroomMedia, was sentenced to jail by Judge Philip Babington. According to figures provided by the prosecution, Mahoney ‘could’ have cost the movie industry £120m in lost revenue. Ultimately, however, the claims of a film industry out for blood ended up somewhat watered down. In the cold light of day the court accepted a figure closer to £12m – quite an ‘achievement’ for a “partially blind recluse” who lived in a bedroom in his parents’ particularly modest home. Given the tendency of the prosecution in these cases to blow losses figures wildly out of proportion, it’s perhaps more prudent to look at numbers backed up by evidence. It doesn’t appear to be in question that Mahoney made £280,000 in advertising revenue from his sites and he was found in possession of £82,390 in cash when he was raided. That’s a decent amount by almost anyone’s standards and was never likely to be looked upon lightly by the court. So, on the basis that Mahoney made large sums of money illegally it should come as no surprise that having pleaded guilty to substantial fraud he should’ve expected a custodial sentence this week. Such is the current climate in the UK and few people watching the case expected anything different. But while some might argue that the term should have been limited to a few weeks or a handful of months, on Thursday the court handed Mahoney a four-year sentence, one of the toughest in UK pirate prosecution history. For someone of Mahoney’s standing that term seems overly cruel and it appears that Mahoney’s lawyers feel so too. On Thursday they announced that the 29-year-old will be mounting an appeal, presumably to ensure that any punishment received fits the crime. As we wait for the legal basis of that appeal to be made public, readers might be interested to hear of another fraud case that was concluded this week. It involved businessman Nicholas Marcou from London, who used his legitimate businesses and contracts with supermarkets such as Aldi, Lidl, Sainsbury’s and Asda to fraudulently obtain millions from Barclays Bank. According to figures provided by City of London Police, actual losses to Barclays Bank (versus the hypothetical losses conjured up in the Mahoney case) were £8,576,811. Unlike Mahoney, who appears to have spent most of his adult life in a bedroom at his parents’ house, Marcou enjoyed ‘his’ money. According to a local news report he bought two homes worth more than £1.4m and £650,000 worth of cars including three Bentleys, three Aston Martins, a Porsche 911, and a Rolls Royce Silver Spirit. While Marcou appears to have been driven by greed, Mahoney appears to have given much of his money away. According to a court report he “did not exhibit any of the features of a lavish lifestyle and his spending was concerned only to paying employees, running the site and accessing adult websites.” It’s also worth bearing in mind that even if we take the previously mentioned £12m figure as accurate, those presumed losses were racked up by users of Mahoney’s site, not Mahoney himself. Site users were the ones who turned up and clicked ‘play’ and didn’t pay for whatever it was they watched. Although he clearly played a part, Mahoney didn’t take that money from the studio’s pockets, the public did. Marcou alone took the money from the bank. Finger pointing aside, Mahoney ended up with a four-year sentence. For the record, Marcou the bank defrauder received just 3.5 years. While anti-piracy groups such as FACT, who investigated the case, view Mahoney’s actions as extremely serious, something feels fundamentally wrong here. Make no mistake, Mahoney should receive some punishment, if only because he knowingly and deliberately broke laws he knew could get him into serious trouble. But should this man living on the fringes of society be given a more punishing sentence than a man who systematically stole £8.5m in cash from a bank in order to fund a dream lifestyle? Perhaps in due course Mahoney’s defense team will raise the same questions. Until then he remains behind bars. Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services. |
| 3:56p | 283 Developers Have Contributed to Popcorn Time, So Far
There are several versions of the application in active development and the most popular ones all have millions of users. Besides the users, software developers have also shown a keen interest in the tool. While most forks have a small group of code developers there are many more chiming in with new code, fixes and improvements. TF spoke to the team behind the popular Popcorn Time .io fork who recently made a visual presentation of how a ‘swarm’ of developers contributed over time. The data is based on statistics from the development platform at a time when around 250 people had contributed. This number has increased to 283 today and will likely hit 300 during the weeks to come. The motion in the video is meaningless, but the above shows that the application itself was built by a swarm of developers, just like all videos are streamed by a BitTorrent swarm. It also shows that a lot of people don’t mind being publicly associated with the project. While some use only their nickname, it’s not hard to identify some of the key developers. Most contributors, however, don’t believe that they are crossing a line. While Hollywood characterizes the software as illegal and one of the greatest threats it faces, most developers just want to code. The core Popcorn Time team doesn’t believe its doing anything wrong either, but admit that users may run into trouble, something we’ve seen happening recently. “So far, no jurisdiction has yet clearly said that Popcorn Time, the application, was illegal. The use of that application, however, is indeed illegal in most countries when downloading copyrighted content,” they tell TF. While Popcorn Time does rely on APIs which almost exclusively link to pirated files, the code itself is legal and open source. “Popcorn Time is nothing more than the combination of a web-browser, a torrent client and a video player. The content, copyrighted or in public domain, isn’t distributed by us,” the Popcorn Time team says. “Popcorn Time is Open Source, so you can look at each line of code and notice that none of these lines are illegal or contain links to copyrighted content,” they add. This is a position pretty much all of the 283 developers agree with. People who are interested in more information on how the swarm video of the development process was made can find more details here. Perhaps the Popcorn Time team will consider publishing an update when another year passes. Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services. |
| 9:29p | Intellectual Property? Why Words Matter In The Copyright Debate
This is far more important than most techies realize. Language nuances, not objective descriptions, more often than not determine what becomes law and what doesn’t. When you’re calling the copyright monopoly any kind of “property”, or using property-related words such as “own” or “have” in relation to this monopoly, you’re reinforcing that positivity around the concept. I saw a comment on Reddit about my last article describing why “Intellectual Property” was a never-touch-never-use enemy’s term; the commenter just blankly stated that it was accurate and descriptive and thought that was it. No, it’s not, it’s absolutely not; the enemy would like you to think it is descriptive of the copyright monopoly, in a complete effort to misdirect and delude – for such misdirection would let them keep the privilege. The copyright monopoly is an exclusive right. More precisely, it is a governmentally-granted private monopoly that interferes with property rights. It’s noteworthy that the copyright industry doesn’t even use the property moniker internally. If you listen to their lawyers, they all say “we hold the exclusive rights”. That is precise language, as opposed to “own” or “property”. The only people in the copyright industry who use the property moniker – everywhere and all the time – are, you guessed it, PR people and lobbyists. There’s something to learn here: When you manage to get your wishlist described in words that suggest it’s a natural right or positive to development, your wishlist will become law. The opposite is also true. One particularly enlightening example was the abolishment of the estate tax in the United States in April this year. The estate tax – sometimes called an inheritance tax – is a tax paid on a deceased person’s estate before the rest is inherited by their heirs. “Estate tax” sounds kind of academic and theoretical, when it’s not a levy on somebody who has no use for their money anymore anyway, or a tax on people with large estates (“rich folks who can afford it anyway”). So a couple of bright people reworded it as “death tax”, and talked about it in those terms everywhere. The new term caught on, and the concept stood no chance of survival once it was called a “death tax” instead. This is extremely important to understand: whether a political concept survives or not, whether it is enforced with violence or not, depends entirely on whether it is referred to mostly in positively- or negatively-associated words. This is why I insist on calling governmentally-granted private monopolies that interfere with property rights “industrial protectionism”, a term abbreviating to IP, for protectionism is exactly what those monopolies are, and any legislator shudders in disgust at the word “protectionism”. This is also why I insist on saying “the copyright monopoly”, for right in itself is a very positive word that any legislator will vote in favor of. But when you tack on “monopoly” at the end, and if this becomes predominant, the concept would it be voted down in a heartbeat – for all of a sudden, it describes the governmentally-granted private monopoly, instead of suggesting a natural right (which it absolutely isn’t). To further illustrate this, the liberal party group ALDE in the European Parliament is largely divided down the middle whether this protectionism is good or bad. But that’s because half of them haven’t questioned the lobbyists’ use of the “property” moniker, and assumed that “because it is property, it must be good, so we will fight for it”; the other half has seen the man behind the curtain and oppose monopolies under any name. A party group like ALDE that would be very in favor of the free market, against corporatism, and which would positively abhor any governmentally-granted private monopoly that interferes with property rights will still vote for this kind of protectionist crap, on the sole reason that they think it is “property” and never has had any reason to think otherwise. Yes, language is that powerful. That’s why you should never use the language of the enemy. It’s not the entertainment industry or the music industry; it’s the copyright industry, plain and simple. And they don’t safeguard their rights or their copyright; they safeguard their monopolies, clarified as their copyright monopoly. This is part of a larger arbitrary umbrella concept, Industrial Protectionism. If we win the language, we win the framing. If we win the framing, we win back our liberties. If we don’t, we won’t. It really boils down to that. Lobbyists understand this. We must too.  About The Author Rick Falkvinge is a regular columnist on TorrentFreak, sharing his thoughts every other week. He is the founder of the Swedish and first Pirate Party, a whisky aficionado, and a low-altitude motorcycle pilot. His blog at falkvinge.net focuses on information policy. Book Falkvinge as speaker? Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services. |
Branded a “Netflix for Pirates,” the 
One mistake that geeks and techies often make, but PR professionals and lobbyists never make, is the observation that words don’t just have a precise meaning – they also have a positive or negative chime to them. Therefore, lobbyists try very hard to establish a language where everything they want is described in words with a positive chime.
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