The Banality of Gregg

"There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary to public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute or common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back."

Robert Heinlein, Life-Line (1939)

Who is Indiana Gregg? Until yesterday, I didn't know. Now that I unfortunately do, I can provide a succinct summary: Indiana Gregg is stupid, insane, and unwittingly evil. Why? Well, she's a mediocre indie musician whose album was uploaded to The Pirate Bay last year. Her husband, Ian Morrow, finally noticed this last month and emailed TPB asking them to remove it. After receiving a typical sassy reply, Morrow sent them another threat, in which he claimed that all file sharing via BitTorrent is illegal, that Gregg's album had been downloaded over 250,000 times from trackers (torrents of her album have no peers or seeds on TPB), that Gregg is #1 on "myspace charts", that they've been nearly bankrupted by unauthorized downloading, and demonstrated his mastery of the word "u". Oh, and he CCed this to several MSPs. Having been rebuffed once more, Gregg herself joined the fray, at which point the entire situation went from merely dumb to outright crazy.

In her emails, Gregg accused TPB of hosting her copyrighted material (trackers only host a small set of checksums of the material and allow peers to discover one another; the process includes none of the material itself), and insisted that TPB (a Swedish site with servers all over the world) must follow the DMCA (a law of the United States). Moreover, she's supposedly gone from bankruptcy to being a millionaire in the course of a day—she must be doing something right. For some reason, this failed to convince TPB's admin to acquiesce to her demands. Two days ago, TorrentFreak posted Gregg's rambling, catastrophically misinformed open letter to TPB and all file sharers. Protip: this sort of thing is what spokespeople are for. Gregg demonstrates several types of idiocy I consider to be worth fighting, so I'll do that now.

I'm sure he has his core values that he wants to defend... I have mine... and I'm not afraid to speak about them... for the sake of music.. and the common good.

We have good reason to be wary of anyone who presumes to not only know what the "common good" is, but also to speak for it. Gregg is just about the last person I'd want to speak for me.

The Wild West of the Internet seems to be getting seriously out of hand and i've been wondering if and when the Internet Police will come and sort it all out. I mean... this is the new Wild West...

The internet is scary, someone call the sheriff! You know there's trouble when someone interprets technological metaphors as the literal truth. Before long, they'll start talking about trucks and tubes.

We've all heard and read every form of complaint about the Internet. From cyber-bullying, to child pornography sites, to copyright theft in the form of 'file-sharing'.

I've always found it difficult to take complaints about "cyberbullying" seriously, because the people who act like it's a major problem are usually school administrators who've either ignored, or utterly failed at handling, the much more significant problem of actual bullying. And now they think it would just be easier to try to restrict what people can say to each other, instead of what they can do to each other. Over 20 CPS students were shot and killed this year. They never had the option of signing off.

Also, what is "copyright theft"? How do you go about stealing a person's copyrights—not their copyrighted material, but the copyrights themselves? If this were possible, Gregg would literally have no right to complain, as she would no longer possess the copyrights on her work.

Imagine....What if the Internet had 'frontiers'. Why can we go all over the world on the Internet without a passport?

If that were the case, it wouldn't even be the internet. An unknown but insightful person once said: "It is the nature of information to transgress artificial boundaries." As numerous entities have attempted to apply national borders to a global network, the truth of this statement has been proven repeatedly. Chinese internet users routinely use proxies to break through their government's censorship firewall. Pandora blocked non-US users, but this was not a loss for their users, it was a loss for Pandora and the artists whose music they feature. Videos on Hulu and Comedy Central are also inaccessible to non-US users, and this only drives potential viewers elsewhere—often to the BitTorrent trackers Gregg despises. The more you tighten your grip, the more star systems will slip through your fingers.

Why are cybernauts allowed to steal goods from the store 'shelves' and 'shop windows' and justify it as 'sharing'?

"You wouldn't steal a car." Where have we heard that before? She mistakenly equates intangible goods on the internet to tangible goods in real life, refusing to acknowledge how greatly they differ. Pressing and packaging a few thousand CDs requires significant financial and material resources. Copying the same album a few thousand times requires almost no resources. If you actually stole a CD from a store, you'd likely face misdemeanor charges and receive community service and a relatively small fine. If you upload an album to the internet, you could receive a jail term and hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines. Something is seriously out of balance here. Furthermore, she assumes everyone who downloads copyrighted material would have bought it; this is not necessarily the case.

Since the birth of the Internet, people have been hacking software, stealing music, books, films, television shows, credit card numbers, eBay accounts, IP addresses... you name it, if it's out there and can be downloaded, it's being virtually stolen from under your nose.

Stealing IP addresses? Is that like hackers stealing your megahertz? I'd hate to think what would happen if she found out I have a list of every IP address ever.

So, why is this Wild West so hard to monitor? Why are people up in arms and waiving their guns wildly... ... Are these new pirate ships sharing other people's goods for gold? Of course they are... yes, I'm speaking about the torrent sites... and all the other sites who are making money on other people's back...

Wouldn't she be happy to see these people waive their metaphorical guns? And I find it difficult to believe she'd be okay with this situation if TPB were a not-for-profit organization.

Is the Internet really that much 'bigger' than the 'real' world? I think not. I believe that in the near future, we will all be using our Internet passports. If the government can do it in the real world, what's stopping them from monitoring this new 'Wild West' phenomenon of the Internet in every town, city, state and country.

The internet is not real life. It just isn't. It is a system which allows nearly any information to be shaped into nearly any structure. Trying to force it into the mold of the incredibly limited real world is not only a stupid mistake, but also impossible. We already have a real world, and if you want the internet to precisely mirror it, you probably don't want the internet to exist at all. It would be pointless and redundant. Really, how would Gregg feel if her fans around the world without "internet passports" couldn't watch her music videos?

I mean... Don't we have just as much right as citizens to be protected on the Internet as we would be anywhere else? And really, the only people who would disagree with this idea are people who either are engaging in illegal activity or people who claim 'civil liberty and freedom of speech' on the Internet, but remember guys, those freedoms are only good until you begin to harm other people.

You are already protected on the internet. Specifically, you can't be stabbed, shot, raped or murdered over the internet. Many people fail to realize the significance of this—do you really want the internet to be like the real world? And I truly love it when someone's arguments are so weak, they're forced to accuse you of being a criminal if you disagree with them. Or a rapist. Or a pedophile. Or a terrorist. Perhaps you just hate America. Is that it? Why do you hate America?

You don't have freedom to shout from the rooftops at 3am outside your neighbor's house.... and it's certainly not your civil right to steal from your local baker and share his cream puffs outside his shop window...either, is it?

This is a delightful comparison; I've definitely been there before. Every time my browser copies someone's web page into its cache without authorization, it wakes up the whole neighborhood, someone calls the cops, and it all spirals out of control from there.

Oh, wait. That's just what Indiana Gregg wants the internet to be like.

These websites are making a constant steady flow of income by using other people's goods...they are pointing people to the goods (music) for free and selling masses of advertisement because people come to 'leech' the goods...these sites are basically allowing people to steal and destroy the music industry (which is in fact like shooting themselves in their own foot).

Must music be industrialized? Look at what you get when art is industrialized: Thomas Kinkade, the painter of blight. Bland, inoffensive, mass-marketed garbage. Do we really need more of that kind of music? As an indie artist who is supposedly #1 on "myspace charts", Gregg should recognize the internet's significant contribution to her popularity. She already uploads her music videos to YouTube (a site that runs their own ads) for people to watch for free! Her arguments certainly shoot themselves in the foot.

So, you'd be silly to think that the Internet police are not planning on coming. How easy would it be to simply find all these people who are illegally 'sharing' and slap a lawsuit on them. They can do that with a virtual push of a button. How hard do you think it will be for the ISP's to hand over your Internet passport over to the new frontier police? They can see how much you've 'shared' and potentially fine every single torrent user. I bet the torrent sites wouldn't like that very much. Suddenly all their users would disappear.

Last year, in an article on Sky News, I read that a woman received a massive fine for file sharing on the KaZaA network. I thought, great!

When your only weapons are lawsuits, everyone looks like a defendant. If, as a musician, you think this is "great!", your brain is broken. That's all there is to it. You're breathtakingly ignorant of both the legal history of file sharing, and human nature in general, if you can't understand one simple thing: suing your fans is the best way to lose them. Just ask Metallica—people don't even want their music for free! Do you honestly believe you could extract trillions in fines from the millions of users who download music? Good luck getting blood out of that stone.

Put simply, musicians will not be able to exist financially in order to create music if income streams are cut off (whether or not a record label comes to play).

And this is exactly what is happening.

As a musician and an independent record-label, I see my livelihood being sucked away every day through file-sharing and torrent sites which are allowing copyright material to flow in and out of their sites.

Where are all these musicians whose livelihood has been obliterated by file sharing? When's the last time a musician gave up and said "You know, I'd love to keep making music, but the internet took all my money"? If this actually happened, the RIAA would be shouting about it from the rooftops (at 3 AM, naturally).

Hmmm...........well, I assume that the torrent sites are planning to be adaptable pretty soon then, considering the number of pending lawsuits from pretty strong and intelligent companies who have not only proven their adaptability to change, but have changed the world as we know it (companies like Microsoft, for example).

Please.. spare us this kind of rhetoric guys. With the likes of Microsoft, Prince, and the IFPI going after you, any outsider might begin to wonder when YOU plan to adapt to 'change'. It's becoming evident that your business model is a sinking ship. Pretty soon, your users will be slapped with fines and more big companies will be slapping on lawsuits. Why not just sink your ship yourselves..eh? That's really what you're doing.. Your resistance to 'change' is in complete conflict with your very survival...

Take your hands off the period key and step away from the computer. (That's the sort of "Internet Police" we need!) I don't know where people get the idea that "ellipsis" means "press period however many times you feel is appropriate". I have to deal with correspondence from middle-aged soccer moms on a regular basis, and you wouldn't believe how common this is. Three dots. It's just three little dots, dammit. It's not meant to be a generic delimiter of your thoughts, and it isn't equivalent to a period, or a comma.

And while Microsoft may be strong, it's quite a stretch to call them "intelligent" and use them as an example of companies that have "changed the world"—is she implying this was a good change? They've had antitrust suits filed against them by the US and EU, received the highest fine ever charged by the EU, and they've been found guilty in numerous private suits. The entire field of web design would be much better off if they hadn't spent a decade releasing a series of browsers that practically ignore web standards. Almost all of their programs have been on various file sharing networks for years, so they probably aren't successfully reducing the availability of pirated software. The IFPI and Prince (seriously, Prince?) obviously don't pose a serious threat to the proliferation of BitTorrent trackers (TPB once acquired IFPI's domain name); if they did, they would've taken care of the problem years ago, and Gregg wouldn't even need to write this ridiculous letter. Also, dying isn't the best way to survive, but I probably shouldn't expect her to understand things like natural selection.

Let's see how adaptable to 'change' they decide to become... and put their Darwin theory where their mouth is....

You want to see adaptation? XDCC, Napster, Gnutella, eDonkey2000, Kazaa, Soulseek, Direct Connect, Ares Galaxy, Demonoid, Mininova, The Pirate Bay, Oink.cd, Waffles.fm, What.cd. Many of these services have survived despite major legal action. Those that couldn't survive were replaced by those that can. It doesn't matter whether they "decide to become" anything—evolutionary fitness isn't limited to biology.

Incorrect conclusions are derived from incorrect premises and incorrect reasoning. What perversion of reason leads someone to weave such a moronic, fascistic, and utterly wrong statement from so many varieties of ignorance, and hurl it into the internet? A massive sense of entitlement, a severe empathy deficit, and an incomprehensible disrespect for freedom. If a person seriously believes their source of income must be preserved at any cost, even if it means having the governments of the world eliminate privacy and liberty on the internet, a crowning achievement of humanity which has become so valuable precisely because of its freedom, they are mentally defective—and an ego that large obviously doesn't leave much room for intelligence. What Gregg proposes is so outrageous, we must question the firmness of her grip on reality. The rest of us will not stand to see the revolutionary medium of the internet virtually destroyed, just to cater to the whims of a bankrupt lunatic millionaire.

Indiana Gregg, it seems nobody has told you this, but somebody must: You are not that important. Not even close.