Stop the press. I just had a revelation. A serious one. There was actual light in the sky.
It was right in front of our noses the whole time, and nobody ever saw it: the CFC forum rules.
http://forums.civfanatics.com/faq.php?faq=updated_rules_2011
There it is, folks. And this isn't unique to CFC, either. I see lots of web sites do this, and some, such as the forum at the Sins of a Solar Empire web site, go so far as to prohibit all political discussions in their Off Topic section (and seeing as how holding a civil political discussion online is almost impossible, they definitely have a point).
Free Speech doesn't apply on the web. And it's impossible for SOPA to take away something you never actually had.
Freedom of Speech doesn't apply to the web. That was never the point behind it. The idea behind Freedom of Speech is that governments should not arrest you for speaking your mind. The right to speak your mind does not include the right to log onto someone else's web site and spout, or to have your opinion published in the Opinion section of a newspaper, or to wave protests signs on someone else's front yard.
...but they can't control it. That's it.
With bittorrent, every user is not only a downloader, but also an uploader. You can shut down MegaUpload, because they have their servers at a few hosters. You can't shut down bittorrent, because everyone is a server.
You don't control crime. You prosecute it. I've not seen an answer so far that I can accept. You can seldom stop a dedicated criminal beforehand (and no one has yet brought up prior restraint), but you can arrest and prosecute afterwards - as has happened to Megaupload. What happens if the Feds go after BitTorrent, Inc.?
So, how does one control crime on the Internet?
What happens if the Feds go after BitTorrent, Inc.?
Yet.CFC is not the gov't....
Yet.
What happens if the Feds go after BitTorrent, Inc.?
Ads on their website from people coming to download the client?Nothing. Their network infrastructure is not required for anything. If the company goes out of bussiness, everything else will still work.
(......i have no idea how they earn their money)
Yup and that's the beauty of the internet. It's grown too big to be contained. The distribution of digital media is going to change, whether these corporate thugs like it or not. They can try to pass laws like SOPA but as we've fortunately seen, all that's doing is pissing a lot of people off.
I wouldn't have thought that someone wearing your avatar would adopt the view that we're all going to be thoroughly buggered by corporate interests, and that our only choice is exactly how we permit them to go about it.
I didn't mean to suggest that it wasn't useful to work within the existing legal framework, I meant that your goals for reform seem rather limited. Gradualism doesn't mean bending over and taking it rumpwise, which is basically what you're suggesting we do.I prefer to work within the framework of the law to gradually change things: Political instability doesn't help ANYONE, except the most ruthless bastards out there, and I guarantee that they'll probably be worse than the corporate interests....
If all else fails, then as the Declaration of Independence said (to paraphrase): "When the law no longer serves the people, then the people must overthrow the unjust laws and replace them with just ones."
The reason I'd be willing to compromise is the fact that I'm a veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan, and I've seen firsthand what complete anarchy results in, and I'd rather avoid that if at all possible (Afghanistan was a complete hell-hole when we invaded... Now, thanks largely to the Army Corps of Engineers, its only a partial hell-hole; Iraq, unfortunately, went the other way when we invaded).
Licensing from people and companies who use their technology commercially, for example to distribute large updates for games. Blizzard use BitTorrent to issue patches to World of Warcraft and other newer games, and I'm pretty sure a lot of other companies do as well.(......i have no idea how they earn their money)
In the early days of Napster, I would listen to the radio, and if I liked a song, I'd Google the lyrics to find out what the song was, then download it. I found out that four of the songs that I liked were all from Ace of Base. Piracy is how I learned that I'm a pretty big AoB fan. I ended up buying all four of their albums.
The idea that piracy actually cuts into profits is questionable.
Licensing from people and companies who use their technology commercially, for example to distribute large updates for games. Blizzard use BitTorrent to issue patches to World of Warcraft and other newer games, and I'm pretty sure a lot of other companies do as well.
actually Bit-Torrent is a protocol, and its specifications are public.Alright, Wiki'd bit-torrent. You have to download bit-torrent from a company, right? BitTorrent Inc. Can't by law, regulations be created to control the use of it's product for criminal purposes - like stealing copyrighted material? Newspapers, Radio, Television all have these regulations.
Adoption
A growing number of individuals and organizations are using BitTorrent to distribute their own or licensed material. Independent adopters report that without using BitTorrent technology and its dramatically reduced demands on their private networking hardware and bandwidth, they could not afford to distribute their files.[18]
[edit] Film, video and music
[edit] Broadcasters
- BitTorrent Inc. has obtained a number of licenses from Hollywood studios for distributing popular content from their websites.
- Sub Pop Records releases tracks and videos via BitTorrent Inc.[19] to distribute its 1000+ albums. Babyshambles and The Libertines (both bands associated with Pete Doherty) have extensively used torrents to distribute hundreds of demos and live videos. US industrial rock band Nine Inch Nails frequently distributes albums via BitTorrent.
- Podcasting software is starting to integrate BitTorrent to help podcasters deal with the download demands of their MP3 "radio" programs. Specifically, Juice and Miro (formerly known as Democracy Player) support automatic processing of .torrent files from RSS feeds. Similarly, some BitTorrent clients, such as µTorrent, are able to process web feeds and automatically download content found within them.
- DGM Live! purchases are provided via BitTorrent.[20]
[edit] Personal material
- In 2008, the CBC became the first public broadcaster in North America to make a full show (Canada's Next Great Prime Minister) available for download using BitTorrent.[21]
- The Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK) has since March 2008 experimented with bittorrent distribution, available online.[22] Only selected material in which NRK owns all royalties are published. Responses have been very positive, and NRK is planning to offer more content.
- The Dutch VPRO broadcasting organization released three documentaries under a Creative Commons license using the content distribution feature of the Mininova tracker.
[edit] Software
- The Amazon S3 "Simple Storage Service" is a scalable Internet-based storage service with a simple web service interface, equipped with built-in BitTorrent support.
- Blog Torrent offers a simplified BitTorrent tracker to enable bloggers and non-technical users to host a tracker on their site. Blog Torrent also allows visitors to download a "stub" loader, which acts as a BitTorrent client to download the desired file, allowing users without BitTorrent software to use the protocol.[23] This is similar to the concept of a self-extracting archive.
[edit] Government
- Blizzard Entertainment uses BitTorrent (via a proprietary client called the "Blizzard Downloader") to distribute content and patches for Diablo III, StarCraft II and World of Warcraft, including the games themselves.[24]
- Many software games, especially those whose large size makes them difficult to host due to bandwidth limits, extremely frequent downloads, and unpredictable changes in network traffic, will distribute instead a specialized, stripped down bittorrent client with enough functionality to download the game from the other running clients and the primary server (which is maintained in case not enough peers are available).
- Many major open source and free software projects encourage BitTorrent as well as conventional downloads of their products (via HTTP, FTP etc.) to increase availability and to reduce load on their own servers, especially when dealing with larger files.[25]
[edit] Others
- The UK government used BitTorrent to distribute details about how the tax money of UK citizens was spent.[26][27]
As of 2011 BitTorrent has 100 million users and a greater share of network bandwidth than Netflix and Hulu combined.[31][32][dubious discuss]
- Facebook uses BitTorrent to distribute updates to Facebook servers.[28]
- Twitter uses BitTorrent to distribute updates to Twitter servers.[29][30]
At any given instant of time BitTorrent has, on average, more active users than YouTube and Facebook combined. (This refers to the number of active users at any instant and not to the total number of registered users.) [33][34][dubious discuss]
CableLabs, the research organization of the North American cable industry, estimates that BitTorrent represents 18% of all broadband traffic.[35][dated info] In 2004, CacheLogic put that number at roughly 35% of all traffic on the Internet.[36][dated info] The discrepancies in these numbers are caused by differences in the method used to measure P2P traffic on the Internet.[37]
Routers that use network address translation (NAT) must maintain tables of source and destination IP addresses and ports. Typical home routers are limited to about 2000 table entries[citation needed] while some more expensive routers have larger table capacities. BitTorrent frequently contacts 2030 servers per second, rapidly filling the NAT tables. This is a common cause of home routers locking up.[38]