Re: [tor-relays] Amazon abuse report

[Lukas Erlacher <l.erlacher@xxxxxxxxx>]

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.
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