[tor-relays] Amazon abuse report

[Gordon Morehouse]

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Lukas Erlacher:
> Let me chime in here in regards to torrents to be perhaps not the 
> devil's, but the radical's advocate.

A lot of the people wishing to handle bittorrent are aware of these
arguments and may not wish to block it so much as throttle the hell
out of it.

And thus we find ourselves sort of considering to act like Comcast,
except in a good-faith defense of our network.  m(

> 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.

Yes, and I'd actually love to see a sort of 'Torrent Library of
Congress' bots that downloads stuff from various trackers in order of
lowest # of seeds, so it doesn't vanish.  One of my many ideas I'll
never have time to do until I'm 80.

> 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?

Yes, yes and yes, but I would vastly prefer if Little Bobby Torrents
from Schenectady downloading the testament to American culture that is
"Bang Bus 32" didn't impact the bandwidth of people trying to use Tor
to get important information around.  Yeah, I just made a judgement
about relative quality of information there, and that's ... okay.  See
http://radioornot.com/site/?p=5181

> 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.

Who said anything about blocking?  Maybe others.  I'd prefer
throttling.  There are many legitimate uses for torrents.  Throttling,
maybe based on amount of data transferred (if that could ever be known
at the edge(s) of the Tor network) is a better, though not perfect
solution.

> 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.

Not trying to censor anything, personally, not that I run an exit node
(yet).

Best,
- -Gordon M.

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