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I don't think this is the right place for you to try and justify your refusal to pay for content people create. I think most people on this list would prefer you keep political opinions not related to tor off list.
Cheers
Ramo
On Sun, Nov 03, 2013 at 11:50:58PM +0100, Lukas Erlacher wrote:
Let me chime in here in regards to torrents to be perhaps not the devil's, but the radical's advocate.
I'm sure everyone here will agree that a good case can be made that copyright laws as they stand today are a perversion of, and counter-productive to, their original stated intention of "advancement of the arts and sciences", and just as leaking secret information and evidence of wrongdoing is a protest and defense against governments that try to hinder freedom and transparency, so is distributing copyrighted cultural goods a protest and defense against content industries (that are often justifiably compared to criminal organisations ("MAFIAA") due to their frequently corrupt and abusive conduct) that attempt to censor culture in order to excise maximum profit from it. Cultural goods that should be preserved and made available to everyone rot away every day because they were not allowed to be preserved and distributed.
Do not indict torrents because it's all "movies and porn of horrible quality" - that is defamation. The hollywood movies and the porn may not have much "cultural value", but who is the arbiter of what "cultural value" is? And even if it was found unanimously that porn does not concern culture (hah!), then for every TB of porn and hollywood shite you block, there are Megabytes of bona fide culture liberated from the shackles of copyright that you throw to the wolves, saying "it's just torrents". And doesn't wikileaks use mostly torrents for distributing their releases?
When you block torrenting, you're making a decision to censor information and speech based on it being done using a method that is predominantly used for "illegitimate", "illegal" activity; in that case, why not shutter Tor entirely? We all know it's mainly used by fraudsters and other criminals, and right now at this time we know that 80% of Tor clients are zombies from a botnet.
Censor torrents because your provider will shut you down if you generate DMCA complaints and C&D's; censor them because you truly believe that the torrents are a necessary sacrifice to allow the Tor network to continue to function; don't censor them because they don't contain worthwhile speech that deserves to be protected. _______________________________________________ tor-relays mailing list tor-relays@lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-relays