Ethical moderation issue
Ron Edwards:
So, the question is whether I'm going to request the Forge community not to link to Torrent or other similar sites/services.
I'm not laying judgment down on any current threads. There are no written Forge rules about this issue and so it's bogus for me to moderate. Nor do I consider myself a cop for copyright in a general sense. No one has done anything wrong.
What I am saying is that I'm on the fence about whether such links should be permitted from now on. The Forge isn't a democracy, so this isn't about how many people say Yea or Nay, nor about how loudly and passionately they argue. But this is definitely a case where community input will help me get my head together about it. I'm asking for input regarding the issue and how it might or might not relate to what the Forge is about.
Best, Ron
Chris_Chinn:
A practical and neutral reason to avoid linking torrents here, at least, is that it generally is one of the things searched for by spambots on what places to spam.
Chris
lumpley:
My feeling is that email or private messaging would be the more appropriate way to share torrent links. I don't super care, but if it were a link to a torrent of my work, I'd prefer not to have it in the public forum.
-Vincent
Callan S.:
Well, I wouldn't refer to it as ethical as if refering to there being one singular global standard of ethics. Along with not using the word 'should'. And is it a request for people not to post them, or is it one of those phoney requests which is actually an order (relative to site use) - like the 'requests' parents do with their children (well I've atleast caught myself doing that, anyway)?
Really to me these questions come down not to what is right but to what will be the consequences (if any) and can I stomach them? Sometimes a sense of right seems to write people a blank cheque in terms of consequences - ie, if somethings right, it's owed an infinity of consequences because it's right. Ie, it treats 'right' as an end in itself rather than a means to an end. Waxing philosophical, but what else has one on these matters?
So what happens, at a physical level (not some quasi reality moral level) if you, say, put up a post saying you'll lock down threads if people post links to copyrighted material (I'm assuming if they post a torrent to their own free work that's not at all the issue)?
On the flip side, seemingly to me for alot of people it's not about attributing the idea of property and that the person controls their property but instead that the person has to do what is the ethical or right thing with their property. Generally (always?) with ethical or right turning out to be the people confusing their subjective viewpoint for global standards. Doing the above stuff tends to sever ones ties with them and sometimes the question of 'ethical' really comes down to who your willing to lose some amount of social contact with.
Eero Tuovinen:
To be absolutely clear, we are talking about culture piracy and not about Bittorrent as technology? It is just as easy to use Bittorrent to distribute legal material as illegal, so it'd seem really weird to ban the technology itself instead of links leading to illegally distributed files. A pretty clear example of Rob Bohl's Misspent Youth, which I've been seeding (torrent-ese for hosting for upload) for a few months after he asked us to last year.
Because you asked about the ethics of the matter, I should note that after years of considering the piracy issue I've myself come to conclude that concerted, government-led resistance to the phenomenon would do more harm than good for civil liberties, and for this reason I advocate for radical revision of IP law to account for the new digital reality; effective means for actually stopping private sharing of copyrighted digital data would involve such drastic backpedaling in privacy rights and media independence that it'd make the most pitch-hearted of social conservatives stagger, and therefore any fight for instituting such needs to be stopped in preference for a different type of culture industry that does not require outright bugging everybody's computers to enforce property rights. I would rather cut back on the culture industry than authorize thought police (which is what anti-piracy measures have to amount to, ultimately, to be effective). I expect this would be obvious to everybody if organizations in the field weren't willing to encourage spotty, arbitrary enforcement of widely disregarded laws merely to slow down the drastic changes culture industry is undergoing. Once the inherent injustice of dragging individual citizens to court for supposed crimes millions of others commit every day really sinks in, I'll be surprised if the prevailing societal strategies won't take a swift turn. Meanwhile I would personally consider us all responsible for not causing unnecessary suffering by drawing the attention of the justice system on our fellow citizens who might engage in a practice more widely accepted than any other three civil rights issues combined.
(Whew, that was a pretty amazingly short explanation of a complex argument. Onwards.)
However, the above argument is mainly about government enforcement of IP laws; I don't recognize a particular ethical imperative for you or anybody else to brook IP piracy in your own house as long as you don't go out of your way to attract the law to haunt the occasional pirate you might choose to evict. In fact, my first reaction would be to keep the Forge piracy-free: I don't know of a compelling argument for how distributing pirated files would advance the site's agenda, and I fully acknowledge that the issue itself, and my stance on it, are both highly contentious at this time. Supporters of piracy have no legitimate need for this platform, while the platform could be severely harmed should the considerable contingent of independent game designers and publishers who support IP rights take offense. You don't need that grief, not when the only reason to go for it would pretty much be symbolic support for a principle that's not by any means central to the Forge agenda.
(I'm assuming here that culture piracy politics are not on the Forge agenda in the foreseeable future. There's certainly no inherent reason for independent art to be either pro- or anti-piracy.)
In case it matters, let me explain why accepting piracy here would be of no benefit to anybody that I can see:
One of the simplest deeds to do in the Internet today is to search for free culture content, be it illegal (IP-protected) or not. Just put in some keywords in Google; it's easier to learn than word-processors, mainly a matter of knowing the argot used in the scene so you can find the right file in the Internet jungle. Meanwhile, the main benefit I could see for the Forge accepting or encouraging piracy would be in the bibliographic power it represents: instead of merely referring to some obscure AD&D supplement I want to discuss I could link directly to the file itself via some torrent or file-sharing site or whatever. The same goes for more recent minor indie games that have become all but lost due to the publisher disappearing, wouldn't it be neat if you could just put it up when you want to talk about it. But, what would be the exact benefit here? Insofar as I can see, anybody interested in checking out the fifth edition Tunnels & Trolls or comparing D&D's first edition to the Holmes text or finally seeing what that Wuthering Heights game was all about is amply capable of making that Google search themselves. This is how we already operate, whether people want to admit this in polite company or not: talk about something interesting online, and anybody so inclined will have the knowhow to seek out the material you mentioned if it's in the Internet at all. Heck, you can put the torrent up yourself and link to it at Google, if the subject seems so esoteric that nobody's done it before you. No need at all for the Forge to get involved here when an extremely effective (effective enough to beat the commercial alternative most of the time) content distribution system is already in place among pirates.
In a nutshell: while I advocate against anti-piracy (and for revised IP laws worldwide), I do not see a need for the Forge to take the highly controversial stance of supporting in public something that is still largely a taboo in the community. I might change my mind if somebody can suggest a really good use for open piracy at the Forge, but if the only motivation for linking to pirated content is the minor convenience of saving some Google searches... no point at all that I can see, and lots of potential for people getting angry. Best to treat the matter the way Americans treat politics and religion, by being silent about it and avoiding offense.
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