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Originally Posted by 6South
While I support your efforts and would agree it is a necessary endeavor I'm curious if you've thought about the long term outcome?
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Of course we have.
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What will eventually happen is the typical internet evolution. The most dedicated criminals will just move to more protected hosting and payment systems who will not cooperate like bitcoin, etc.
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I have heard this all before.
Nobody hosted anywhere is safe, the only reason pirates have found safe harbour until now is because nobody has actually worked to shut down the things we shut down in the way we shut them down.
Just this week we saw a major third party billing company drop their file sharing clients because we leveraged their need to transact with other payment systems and credit cards. The threat of losing their relationships was enough, after many months of pressure, communication and hard work on our part, caused them to rethink their activities and almost 20 file sharing sites were cut loose.
I predict a great many entities who were enabling piracy will be disrupted in their activities. We have many strategies for dealing with piracy, not all of them have been put into place yet.
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I think eventually you will need to move into collecting intelligence on support for the various illegal activities that tend to actually get a reaction - such as the child porn support service providing and basically perform the investigative work for law enforcement so they 1, obtain intelligence they don't have the time or budget to pursue themselves and 2, can see the possibility of winning cases.
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Rubbish, in most countries every case is investigated, the decision to prosecute usually comes down to whether enough evidence was gathered during the investigation to be able to launch a prosecution.
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Unfortunately most of the prosecutions at that level will be Federal (in the case of the US) and even getting the Feds to pursue a case can be close to impossible without doing most of the foundation work for them. Then, the prosecutors only take cases they have a 95 percent or better chance of winning.
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More rubbish. We are co-operating with a number of investigations. Your assertion that prosecutors only take cases they are assured of winning is incorrect. Prosecutions are launched where there is enough evidence to support a conviction.
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I think your service will be busy for a long time to come though, there are always new players coming into the warez / piracy for profit industry and they do tend to take a very short sighted view on things. This is why the same people will keep coming back even after you manage to kill their payment processing. It's no different than the low level spam for profit field (with a lot of cross over between the participants) but as with most Internet based theft the long term players will more and more often end up being members or organized crime rings from the former USSR, Africa and Asia.
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It doesn't matter where an operation is based or what technology it uses or who is behind it. If a piracy site needs to transact in the real world then they are vulnerable to our strategies, likewise if they need to be supported by a method of monetization then they are able to be disrupted.
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It's sad that the general public will end up killing their own freedoms. As long as so many people feel it's not only OK to not pay for services but for a few to feel they should be able to make money by stealing the work of others outright the end game solution will be a system of controls on the Internet that guarantee accountability. It's really only a matter of time, the ecommerce potential in yearly $ has grown to the critical level and the number of people using it to steal has also grown past the level where it cannot continue.
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Just like piracy, IP theft, copying, misappropriation, passing off and brand infringements are all realities of the online age. However just because these problems each present unique challenges does not make what we do a lost cause.
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Right now the fight is still primarily being carried by content and good producers. Once finance enters the ring you will start to see more effective efforts in prosecutions and the development of controls - be that personal accountability such as tracking technologies or better and better DRM.
In all honestly while I do feel your efforts are needed and a necessary part of the process the industry as a whole would probably be better off investing in DRM technology and doing so on a basis that will keep up w/ the crackers. The model of 12 month release dates cannot compete w/ an opposition that works for free and has no release calendar.
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DRM doesn't work, if something can be displayed on a screen it can be copied.
What does work is taking the supply of money away from pirates, taking away their monetization options works, we have proven it works, so now we're scaling up the fight.
I hear all sorts of arguments about why what we're doing is a waste of time, well I am not in a habit of wasting time and what we do does work.
We have seen the shutdown (completely offline) of dozens and dozens of piracy sites. Somewhere in the vicinity of 600 sites have lost one or more forms of payment processing. As we keep the pressure up and get better at what we do we'll simply become quicker and more effective at what we do.
This fight has been going for 126 days, not very long, wait and see what the scoreboard looks like at the 6 and then 12 month marks.