> there is a direct link between free users of file-hosting services and copyright infringement.

There is also a direct link between internet users and copyright infringement. There is also a direct link between prople exchanging information and copyright infringement. And so on.

Copyright is for-profit censorship. As soon as you have two people exchanging information, be it on the net, by pendrives, even exchanging books, as soon as you cut out the middlemen, it will probably be some kind of infringement.

The problem with this, what they call infringement is _normal human behavior_ that shouldnt be infringement in the first place. As soon as people get together, they exchange information. Declaring parts of this information exchange somebody elses "property" and trying to censor it by basically spying on every information exchange between two people, is censorship straight from the darkest surveillance state nightmares. The worst case scanario. It is basically north korea, but not with respect to "political information" but with respect to "proprietary information". Censorship is censorship, whatever paltry excuse you can come up with for it.

> Power is something government should have very little of.

Power is something both goverment _and_ private conglomerates should have very little off. If you have a too weak goverment, private special interests can grab too much power and become de facto goverments piggybacking on weak official goverments, so you get the same negative results for the population. The key is to cut power everywhere before it starts reaching critical, self-sustaining thresholds. And this only works if the people are powerful enough to cut both the goverment and special interests. It works only with a more direct democracy.

> When what you're doing is illegal people are often

Stuff is not simply "illegal" by itself. In a so called democracy, people allegedly far and wide agree that something should be illegal, because they think that it is wrong, and then it becomes illegal by law.

But freely sharing copyrighted stuff is today illegal although a majority of people doesnt really object to it and doesnt think that it _should_ be illegal. The really only reason why filesharing is illegal is not because of a societal consensus that it should be illegal, but because politicians make the policy together with a few stake holders behind closed doors under the exclusion of the public, because the policy will be enforced _against_ the public.

An influential few make the laws, the public is expected to simply STFU and obey. With respect to copyright policy and enforcement, the so called "democracy" here absolutely isn't working.

> So I don't get your point. Is that artificial constructs are bad and everything natural is good?

No, that artificial restrictions are good only when there is a overwhelming agreement that they are beneficial for everyone, especially for those subjecting themselves freely to those artificial restrictions. I dont think that such an agreement, that strict enforcement of for-profit censorship (copyright) on the internet is beneficial for all of us, exists today.

> Copyright is an artificial construct whereas communication is human nature.

According to the copyright creation myth, copyright came into existence when free men, who could freely talk and exchange every information freely with each other, agreed that it is better for everyone to allow creators to censor free information exchange of their works in exchange for creating those works and making those works available. That wide and far agreement between free men, that we have to tolerate a bit of culturally beneficial for-profit censorship then allegedly became a law. We (our ancestors) _agreed_ (and if you didnt get it by now, the emphasis is on the fucking agreement) to give up a part of out natural, god given right to freely communicate with each other (even if the content of this free communication is an Avatar Blue-ray) to encourage creators to create more works than they would do otherwise.

Our ancestors agreed to give up those rights, but maybe we today do not agree any more? What if we today think otherwise and want out god-given natural right back, that our ancestors sold for more books? I personally do not see that kind of far and wide agreement existing any more between free men. Today, only a tiny minority of influential stake-holders violently pushes it, and the majority of free men is merely subject to enforcement, without having a bloody chance in hell to be allowed to re-evaluate that 300 yr old agreement any more. (What do we learn from this btw: Never sell your fucking rights, moron, 300 yrs later you might regret it.)

> It really gets absurd in the cases where you have 100,000 lines of code that's your own but including 2 lines of GPL code means you have to give away your code as it's a derivative work.

It is really absurd when you want to take code somebody else has written with the intent to make it freely redistributable, and want to change its licence to make it not freely redistributable with the intent to be able to sue users who dare to redistribute what was once free code when you took it.

Works under the GPL are not intended to become everybody's free code library. They are specifically intended as an enrichment only for "is free, stays free" code. There is a philosophy of freedom attached to it. If you do not share this philosophy of freedom, the code is not available for you.

> If every law were taken to a referendum then we'd still be living in the dark ages.

Switzerland has had direct democracy for the last 150 years and is certainly not in the dark ages, it is working rather well. Thanks for the insult.

They do not take every law to a referendum, but the key is that they _can_ if they want. They can and they often do veto crazy laws. The ability to legally stop crazy laws without having to resort to fighting, protesting, boycotting, begging politicians, i.e. how "democracy" is obviously understood in the US, is the key.

> Breaking the law simply because

For a law to be fair and just, it has to be accepted by a significant share of the population, i.e. it has to be democratically supported. When laws are simply forced from the top down by a few stake holders and then massively enforced against the population like in pre-democratic feudal middle ages, breaking a unjust law you can not democratically change is a fucking rebellion. A law does not automatically gain legitimacy just by being a "law", otherwise nobody would ever rebelled against feudalism. Feudalism also had "laws". Libya also had "laws" and you know how it ended. A law just being called a law means nothing.

A law gains legitimacy by the process how it is passed. It gains legitimacy by whether it is widely accepted as law. This crazy IP shit is neither. It was decided behind closed doors, by a few greedy sick fucks, and is then applied to millions with the sole intent to extract money from them and everybody knows this. Copyright in its todays form is as undemocratic and illegitimate as a law can get.

> help those of us who care about civil liberties fight against draconian laws

Come on, you fucking dont do anything. You dont attempt anything, you never ever accomplished anything. You know that you have no chance in hell to change this, so whats your plan? How are you gonna get big money out of and democracy into copyright legislation? How exactly do you "fight"?

> join us in our attempts to make copyright laws marginally sane

All you seemingly do is going around telling people not to break "the law", so basically youre part of the problem. You sound like big content, "dont break it, its the law, breaking it will make things worse for you". How is simply bowing down, obeying and not breaking an exploitive, undemocratic and unjust law going to automatically make the law more sane?

> So, how can we help fight them?

Change the election system in the US so you dont have to "fight" them any more, but can just vote them out of politics. Take the power politicians have to push abusive, bad laws. Bring in more direct democracy, so that lawmaking becomes more independent of the few bribeable, single points of failure (politicians). MPAA/RIAA are only able to influence laws because there are only so few politicians to bribe and because, after being bribed, nobody can stop them from introducing abusive laws.

In my view, Paul Graham got it completely wrong. It is not Hollywood that has to be fought, it is the undemocratic political system that has to go. Hollywood just abuses the buggy system because it is so easy to abuse (think Windows 98). After YC "kills Hollywood", simply somebody else will come up to bribe politicians and purchase laws because it is so effective. The system allows for rich people to literally purchase laws.

The cure is not to merely stop this one case of abuse, but to debug the system to prevent any further abuses. "Debug the system" in this case means introduce switzerland style direct democracy to make people able to bypass "professional" politicians and to directly veto abusive and unjust laws.

If the pirate parties are insignificant nationally, they'll also be insignificant internationally. Their internationality wont get them any say in either national or international politics. They have to get stable power in their own nations to make a change.

> It will sure divide their voterbase.

To make a change, you have to get big. A united voterbase wont help them to get there if it is not big enough.

> if they weren't just defenders of internet freedoms

They are not internet freedom defenders per se, they are rather pushing transparency and direct democracy. The focus on internet freedoms only results from their members voting so. But they cant vote for internet fredoms all the time, over and over again, once they agreed on internet freedoms they have to discuss and agree on other topics. Give them enough time and they'll cover everything, simply because theres nothing else for them to do.

> only hurt copyright reform movements.

How exactly? Your alleged "serious" copyright reform movements never achieved anything of significance. The Pirate Party has achieved siginificant visibility in Europe. They have seats in the European Parliament, in the Berlin parliament and will probably get seats in the German federal parliament next year. They have already forced major parties to seriously rethink their internet policies or risk losing the whole sub-30 generation.

> I'd even allow more. Movies do have a tendency to be hideously expensive and

Hideously expensive movies dont have to be made. Just made them cheap enough to be able to turn a profit within 7 years.

> But I'd still say that fifteen years should be a hard upper limit

I'm all for letting everybody vote on it in a referendum. In theory, copyright is supposed to be for the benefit of the people. Let the people decide directly which copyright duration maximizes their benefit. Content producers should not have a say in this at all other than in their individual refrerendum vote.

> some people clearly like it

"some people like it" is not gonna win over any siginficant shares of the desktop market. It wont win anything, it will just annihilate Shuttleworths money and then die off in an epic fail manner. Canonical should be in it to win it, not to merely corner some tiny irrelevant niche within the already tiny 1% Linux desktop market share. Ubuntu was supposed to win over Windows/Mac users, not to scare away its current user base.

"some people like it" is just another way to say "almost everybody else hates it with a passion (but why should we care?)"

North Korea style mass surveillance, mass censorship and mass punishment in order to make sharing of "prohibited information" a life threatening activity.

> I feel like I'm living in a weird parallel universe.

That is a inevitable consequence of Linux growing and becoming commercially interesting and "mainstream". Now the hackers do not have a say more in how their product is going to work and look like, this is now the sole decision of the Mac using "design team". The devs now just implement a specification and thats it. They maybe dont even use the abomination themselves, they maybe hate it es much as their users, but they simply dont pull the strings any more. Who would have thought, that once the year of the Linux desktop actually arrives, we might start hating what it has become.

What is even more ironical, Gnome is still a core GNU project, while even the FSF is recommending GNUstep instead.