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Piracy Stats Don't Add Up
arenam writes to tell us Australian IT is reporting that a recent briefing for the Attorney-General's Department prepared by the Australian Institute of Criminology draws certain piracy statistics into question. From the article: "The draft of the institute's intellectual property crime report, sighted by The Australian shows that copyright owners 'failed to explain' how they reached financial loss statistics used in lobbying activities and court cases. Figures for 2005 from the global Business Software Association showing $361 million a year of lost sales in Australia are 'unverified and epistemologically unreliable,' the report says."
Figures for 2005 from the global Business Software Association showing $361 million a year of lost sales in Australia are 'unverified and epistemologically unreliable,' the report says.
In other news, the sky outside appears to be a "blue" color, and when dropped, most objects behave in a "falling" manner.
Push Button, Receive Bacon
Recent Studies show that the RIAA lost a kajillion trillion dollars in lost revenue - and someone asks - but wait RIAA, isn't that more than the liquid value of the world economy? Finally the truth is revealed! Piracy has foiled their plot for world domination this year, and every year recently - and this has prevented them from gaining the total value of the universe!
PS. First post?
'cause I'm fed up hearing any kind of reasoning like:
There are 2000 pc's sold so how come we only sold 100 Windows XP licenses? It must be pirates!
I chuckled at the quote in the article:
"Some industry groups were reluctant to work with researchers, because of concern about data leaking to competitors."
All I could think of was..."Ha..ha...we have more pirates then YOU DO!"
Seriously what kind of "data" could piracy statistics be used by the competition?
It's how much they pay politician to pass laws in their favor and losy tech firms to invent crappy DRMs, maybe that's where the 361M$ comes from.
Of course they dont want to share how they come up with their data. They know that simply equating downloads to lost sales is not an accurate prediction.
I can't see these stats making any difference. The recording industry is highly unlikely to start making apologies for using bad data, and are going to use the best numbers they can come up with, accurate or not.
Those were exactly my words when I mentioned the piracy statistics in a conversation recently.
If the author of the article wants to be taken seriously, he may want to do more than a basic spell check. I would think strong written skills would be reasonably important as a journalist. Perhaps not.
I was told that I could listen to the radio at a reasonable volume from nine to eleven...
Naturally there numbers are not based in reality. They assume x number pirated copies times retail sale value = amount lost. There's a completely different threshold however, between what people will download/copy for free, and what people are willing to buy.
What difference does it make ? You know you are going bankrupt anyway because people aren't interested in CD's anymore.
Who cares about CD's when you only listen to music on your computer, portable MP3 player, or cellphone ? You can blame it on piracy all you want, but it's not going to change a thing; if you don't adapt to the market you have no chance to survive.
It happened to other markets before, think about photo labs & photo films vendors, they are extincting as well because people are only interested into digicams now. The same is happening with music, CD is an outdated format and thinking you could still make a living out of selling CDs in 10+ years is just foolish - even if piracy were to stop.
"What difference does it make ? You know you are going bankrupt anyway because people aren't interested in CD's anymore."
5 9305
Psst, hey buddy, the post in question is plagiarized and it's 4 years old.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=77984&cid=692
http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2003/10/2/103735/27
YHBT.
HTH.
--
BMO
"4 years old."
Should be 3.
I can't freakin' subtract. Either that, or I've just stepped out of TARDIS and I'm confused.
--
BMO
See, that's where RIAA and company get their statistics - they equate every posting of that to one bankrupt CD store.
This is a sig. It is appended to the end of comments I post.
I don't buy the general arguments that a pirated application worth $100 is a $100 loss. Many of those who pirate software are usually not in so much need of it, that they are willing to pay for it if pirating is no alternative.
Additionally, one must consider the fact that if an application is popular among pirates, it is also likely to sell more copies of its software, simply because more people spread the word about this particular software.
Last but not least, some people do buy software only after using it for some time. A perfect example is Photoshop. It's a typical application that requires a lot of time to learn and costs too much to just "check out" (and I'm aware of the trial version). Some of the graphics artists who find out that this really is a useful and valuable tool, may also purchase the application. So for starters, they help spread the word of Photoshop and they also become potential buyers.
Full Tilt
'"Copyright owners often use street-value estimates to calculate losses, but this assumes that every person who bought pirated goods would otherwise have paid for a legitimate item, the report notes."'
Baloney! The only reason for piracy is to get somthing you're not willing to pay for. If they were willing to pay for it then they would have paid for it, BUT THEY DIDN'T because THEY WERENT!
Duhhh!
'"There is a perception among some rights holders that they are in competition with each other over limited federal government resources," the report says.'
'"They fear that if they reveal the nature of their relationships with government, such as the placement of well-connected Canberra lobbyists, they will jepordise their advantage."'
Such advantage being "relationships with government, such as the placement of well-connected Canberra lobbyists."
Well, duhhh!!
Call me stupid but if your advantage is legalized EXTORTION wouldn't you want to keep it too?
Well Duhhh!!!
It's too stupid to comment on. The real issue is that some politicians buy into it, or, should I say, get paid into it. And yes even the honest ones get paid one way or another. Stock options, board of directors, cushy jobs for inept sons, various "deals," and on and on.
It's bribery for them and extortion for us.
This is a market that is going to disapear. It's that simple. Kids no longer want a k7 (tape), or a CD, they want an Mp3 reader. This is the iPod generation. We few that still think that the CD sales will ever get better are kiding ourselves. Think about the LP that is out of style. Only colectors buy them. If I had all the music I have on CDs my house would be filled with them. This way I save space. To see it from a legal point of view this idea of yours would be very good. On the other hand, black-listing a person would be discrimination, besides a few other things. No one can be targeted as a criminal without being found, proven and tried guilty. What you are talking about is a crime. Innocent until proven guilty. Black-listing all those tipped to be criminals is a crime against human rights. You're not the Gestapo or P.I.D.E., you are a simple salesman of goods. Your market is disapearing, change your act. Make yourself a diferent kind of salesman. Instead of selling cds, offer the listening experience in a nice confortable manner. With coffee, and cakes. CDs are a dying breed and there is nothing that can be done about it. Pirates just see farther ahead that's all.
Blind are we who do not know that we are blind. The world has been boring ever since I got here.
Just my 2 cents...
It is impossible to quantify because you cannot determine if you have actually lost a "sale".
Put another way, with music you have heard it on the radio/MTV etc and you may choose to buy because you like the track (or buy the album because you like a number of the tracks).. as your "utility" of this product is probably quite high - you see value in this purchase.
With software, if you cannot "try" it before, you maybe likely to "borrow" a copy. But more often than not that borrowed copy is not actually utilised and its left on the hard drive, and deleted once the owner needs more space. It is more of a "I want to try for a short time" kind of need, than the "I really need to use this product" kind of purchase. So utility is actually low.
DVDs/films.. In London (UK) the tickets range from £8-£13 (about $15-25). I can see many people finding it difficult to justify seeing a film for this much, unless there is a USP (unique selling point). Have noticed the shorter lad time between cinema and DVD release. So I reckon one of the reasons people pirating is because they never actually planned to see it at the cinema but at the same time cannot wait for the DVD release..
Have not covered all the reasoning, that would be a paper in itself..
http://www.google.com.au/search?q=define%3A+episte mological
:)
You're welcome
"And then I visited Wikipedia
Identity infringement is NOT theft, you still have your identity!!! Calling it "identity theft" is playing right into the hands of giant corperashuns.
Election infringement is NOT theft, you still have your election after all!!! Calling this a "stolen" election is playing right into the hands of giant corperashuns.
Service infringement is NOT theft, you still have your services after all!!! Calling it "theft of services" is playing right into the hands of giant corperashuns.
Sincerely yours,
Brickheaded Literalist
Mods, please do your job.
Perhaps the most suitable punishment for lying lobbyists (is there another kind?) would be to be beaten over the head with philosophy textbooks until they coluld tell their episteme from their noesis.
Pining for the fjords
You would think that anyone who can spell 'epistemologically' would know the difference between 'sight' and 'cite'.
Grow a sense of humor. "I don't know, Jenny. I don't know..." How can you not crack a smile?
And now, a PSA from David Lynch.
Hmm... let's see... a thief gets into the shop and steels a bottle of luxury liquor (something desirable but not essential for living). What will salesman calculate as loss: The price at which he was selling it, or the price at which he got it? Thief is supposedly a poor guy who would never had that kind of money to buy it even if he wanted to.
If an object, merchandise, is too pricey and is not sold in months, can we argue that, if it was stolen, there was no loss?
Someone may argue that those were tangible goods, we will have no dispute over that - let's subtract out the price salesman payed as "real loss", but the key point is the selling price, or price difference, salesman's (hypothetic) profit... should it be accounted for or not, and why?
How can you be a victim of "extortion" when you have freedom of choice to buy or not buy the product in question?
Perhaps "us" should act a bit more intelligently and not fall for the barrage of media hype that brainwashes them into believing that they cannot live without those products.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
So if I understand you correctly... If these hypothetical 1700 out of 2000 pirate consumers who go out, hypothetically buy a computer for several thousand dollars and then pirate Windows XP suddenly had no chance of pirating Windows XP thus forcing them to buy Windows for the extortionate sum of $200 they will either:
a) Morph into Nerds and install Linux?
b) Not buy a PC at all because after spending $1500 plus for a PC spending another $200 for the OS way to much to ask?
There is no chance at all in this or any other parallel universe that they might cave in and shell out the 200 bucks for a legal copy of Windows? I am sure some of those hypothetical 1700 pirate consumers would have been put off buying a PC if it meant atually paying for Windows XP and that some others would have gone the way of Linux. However, since most normal consumers don't dislike Windows with the same religous zeal as many Nerds do (myself included) I think that the majority of those hypothetical 1700 pirate consumers would (complaining loudly of this outrageous annoyance) shell out the extra 200 bucks if they couldn't pirate Windows XP because the cost of the OS is such a proprtionately small part of teh PC+OS package. Arguing that all or even most pirate consumers represent lost sales thus making software piracy a victimless offence is also bunk, to some extent softare piracy does translate into lost revenues for software companies.
Humour? How is this humour? Humour is a kick in the kneecap or a blow on the head, but not this.
For a minute there, i thought it was the Attorney-General's Department who had used the word "epistemologically" correctly in a sentence, rather than some Institute. my world view was momentarily shaken.
i speak for myself and those who like what i say.
Is that piracy in the software side of things (and indeed others) has done alot of GOOD for the world. I bet most of /. folk borrowed or copied Borland Pascal or 3D Studio and fiddled around with it as a kid and learnt to code and are now using legal copies at work or doing it in Linux for free.
I was 12 when my folks got us a 386, I copied Pascal from a school mate, I fiddled with it, I got bored and deleted it, I never used it to make money so I don't feel I did anything wrong, morally anyhow.
I got Modedit (can't recall if it was free or not) as a kid, I fell in love with music creation and now I own my own professional music software.
Try convincing your folks to buy you software as a kid because you want to play with it because it seems cool.
Their are a number of problems I just gota understand better:
1)If someone doesn't feel the urge to buy something anyway how does the FTC let these people get away with the unlitigated gull of first complaining about unnreonable loss from "theft"?
and then them coming up with illogical arguments for reguletory changes-many times based on something they don't understand.
2)Does anyone who does actuall software development and marketing have some solid figures on any angle of these issues? Since it's mid-term election time I'd like to know what sort of blockheaded stuff to anticipate.
I ask because the only experience I have is from some fairly limited anecdotal evidence.
Did they check their ass? That's usually where these statistics are pulled out of.
Modern copyright is theft of culture from everyone and it retards the progress of the useful arts and sciences.
Even going by the price difference, the situation is different. The salesman cannot sell the stolen bottle of liquor; but the record store can still sell a CD to someone willing (and able) to pay the retail price, because nobody was deprived of a physical item. You just can't use normal "theft" logic when dealing with copyright infringement.
Also, one could argue that if someone had bought the CD instead of downloading it, their ISP might be paid less money for the bandwidth (or their ISP's upstream provider may have made less), so therefore record stores are depriving internet providers of income by subverting the user-pays download system.
Your busines shouldn't be selling music CDs
Your busines should be making people entertained by music
Concentrate on the client, not the product!
``It's how much they pay politician to pass laws in their favor''
Favor? These laws make it illegal for me to play DVDs I buy if they use CSS. Obviously, this means I won't buy these DVDs. I don't know how that works in the copyright holders' favor...
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Thanks, it indeed looked quite suspicious, but I still felt for it... oh well, shame on me :-/
[RIAA representative puts left pinky next to corner of mouth] This year we will lose... 100 BILLION DOLLARS !
Let's discuss the real issues, shall we?
- When A pirates software X and B pays for it, the producer still loses even if A never intended to pay for it, as the perceived value of the software is less. Consider the situation where you were the only person in the world who bought the latest music CD and everybody else got the same music by pirating it. Proof of ownership? Hell no - you feel like a sucker, because, in fact, the situation has made you one.
- As is always brought up here in slashdot in other contexts - there's no need to pirate any given piece of software, as there are free alternatives out there. so, even if you see nothing wrong with, say, creating unlicenced drugs to save lives, the fact is that in this case there simply is no analogue. even if there were no OSS, you'd be hard pressed to suggest that anybody NEEDS software.
- Software patents may well be evil. There may well be problems in the IP regime. You may be against the idea that copyright is continuously extended. However, none of this has anything to do with the present discussion of piracy of software, most of which is typically under five years old.
Until the slashdot crowd, collectively (and I'm not saying that all slashdotters think alike, but you'd be just throwing more smoke and mirrors if you were to not believe that there weren't some rather commonly held views here along the lines I am suggesting and that those views have widely seen to be synonymous with a general 'slashdot look on life'), is willing to face up to the real issues instead of throwing up more kneejerk smoke and mirrors, it will continue to be an intellectually dishonest sideshow.I sell a small shareware app and have some indy music. Piracy has cost me $65,989,776,545.82 this year.
it HAS!
At least that is what I am claiming on my taxes... I shuold get at $2 billion dollar refund this year because of piracy.
What? Why cant I make up numbers out of my ass like the RIAA and BSA does and use them as absolute fact?
Nither the RIAA or BSA or any software maker has real numbers, none can give any proof, none can even give a convincing argument. Yet the idiots on capitol hill take it as truth, medai laps it up like it's truth...
only a complete and utter moron believes any of the piracy numbers.
brandelf: invalid ELF type 'KEEBLER'
At least, not in the limited context of this article. Sure, in the wider scope of the whole debate - whether the RIAA should be fighting this war on piracy or not - demands at least some consideration of where along the moral line downloading copyrighted materials lies.
/. hivemind.
In reference to this specific article, however, the salient points would appear to be:
1) The RIAA are using deceit and subterfuge as weapons.
2) A body that has influence on policy decisions noticed.
This naturally hurts the RIAA, but to what degree, and for how long, remains to be seen, and might be a more fruitful use of the
[ cruise / casual-tempest.net / xenogamous.com / transference.org / quantam sufficit ]
Didn't you get the memo? Nowadays, everyone is a victem, so they can't be the culprit. Oh, and businesses can never be on the right side of the law.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
That is true, you can't download unlicensed copies of expensive bottles of luxury liquor off the internet, so theft!=piracy. However, the following logic: 'Baloney! The only reason for piracy is to get something you're not willing to pay for. If they were willing to pay for it then they would have paid for it, BUT THEY DIDN'T because THEY WERENT!', doesn't hold water either. Many people who pirate software, music, movies etc. are quite often people who can afford to buy this material. The reason they pirate this material is because they have plenty of opportunity to do so, there is little chance of getting caught and punished and they save some money to spend on other things. If somebody created a completely fool-proof anti piracy technology and all software/multi-media-content were to use it starting tomorrow a certain percentage of pirate consumers would start to reluctantly pay for the kind material they previously pirated. I simply don't buy the logic that 100% of the people who pirate are also people who can neither afford the pirated material and wouldn't buy it if they couldn't resort to piracy. This may apply to a certain percentage of the software and multi media content pirating public but by no means 100% of them. Basically, however hard you try to rationalize and justify software and multi media content piracy as a practice that doesn't hurt anybody, there is and always will be somebody who loses revenue. You can argue about how large that loss of revenue is but the fact that it happens is indisputable. Of course the assumption that 100% of pirates are people that would otherwise buy *all* the software/multi-media-content they pirate and that *every instance* of piracy represents a lost sale doesn't hold water either. Neither one of these extremes holds water, the truth is somewhere in-between them.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
The "epistemologically unreliable" thing made me think that he might've been a recently-hired philosophy major, maybe even an intern, given the report to do as a research project.
Google says otherwise:
Assuming it's the same guy, I can hardly think of a better resumé. He used to be a lawyer for the other side. (You just know he still has keys to the Death Star.) When he says that the "greatest concern is the potentially unqualified use of these statistics in courts of law", he really knows what he's talking about: he spent two years presenting them on behalf of the recording industry, when they probably went unqualified...
no one really cares about costs until they reach the point of multiple millions, so to get your point across you just skip real numbers and cut straight to the "millions of dollars every year". for example, underage drinking costs taxpayers millions of dallars each year. i have no idea how much it really costs, but now everyone is paying attention. so, illegal downloads cost the industry millions of dollars each year. teenage sex costs taxpayers millions of dollars each year. watching television while skipping commercials costs television networks millions of dollars each year. sarcastic comments on messageboards cost legitimate posters millions of dollars each year. how much is a gallon of gas today? you guessed it, millions of dollars.
sarcasm:
-noun
1. harsh or bitter derision or irony.
Honestly, now! It's "cited".
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
...I wonder if anyone (joe individual filing a normal 10-40 for example) has done this, or tried to? You would definitley need some method to estimate your "sales lost due to piracy" to justify the numbers you might claim, and like has been pointed out, there is no credible way to find out that I have seen referenced. Would just an estimate fly? Any bona-fide accountants here want to take a stab at answering this? Brick and mortar have "inventory shrinkage" where at a minimum they have some sort of paper trail on tangible products before they "shrank away", but how could an individual with a closed license app or song estimate "losses"? Posit you had at least some legitimate sales at your asking price, then go from there.
As always, the elephant in the room (that piracy is substantial and deserves attention, if only because society has collectively devleoped a bargain where creators of intellectual property are entitled to reasonable protection of their works but that protection is being circumvented in massive quantities) is ignored.
Another elephant in the room is "are technical measures to prevent copying actually being circumvented in massive quantities by potential customers?", and another is "do we need additional legal protections, or are the current legal protections actually stronger than we need?".
These are real issues. Slippery slope arguments asking questions like "what if you're the last non-pirate in the world, won't you feel like a sucker?" aren't. They're muddying the waters. "Smoke and mirrors" if you like.
Also consider (whether you feel it is right or wrong) that people ultimatelyonly use a certain percentage of their budgets to actually pay for entertainment per year. If they exceed that they lose out on housing or food or whatever. If someone pirates whatever software or music or whatever but uses the same amount of entertainment dollars each year then how is anything changing? (looking for an honest answer here.)
There have been many articles (industry-sponsored and otherwise) about "piracy", whether the content is music or software (or even data). The article seems so very much like articles about music (music that isn't paid for when used/received)... The responses to the article are pretty similar, too.
Therefore, I propose a new way to answer software piracy articles, such that the flooding hundreds of discussion posts will all align nicely.
I propose that we post answers like, "software wants to be free - the way it wants to be." And, "since programmers should make all their money on tours and they make nothing on the sales of the software, they should give away software and be told that they must tour (and sell merchandise) to make enough money to live." And, "buying software through legit channels only funds evil corporations - (evil corporations don't employ regular, work-a-day people, do they?)" And, one of my personal favorites, "programmers shouldn't get paid after the software is delivered - a painter doesn't get paid every time the painting is sold, does he/she?"
Sarcasm or serious? You decide... film at 11.
Personally, I really like working where I work. I actually want the company's software to succeed and to be sold well. I'd like for the company to remain successful and to flourish. I enjoy having such a great job and an opportunity to fund my family's growth.
Don't forget to vote.
A Passionate Independent Musician
...unless you say "YARR!" while you're doing it.
Find environmentally and socially responsible products on http://buy-right.net
The copyright advocates lose a lot of respect, in my eyes, when they pushed to have copyrights extended to a ridiculous 75 (+20) years. Somehow they feel they should have a lock on culture for generations. Disney of course pushed for this just around the time they're copyrights were going to end. Nothing sleazy about that! Everything created has a piece of something someone did before them in it. Nothing is 100% original yet companies like Disney feel they can use the ideas of others and then deny use of their result in turn. Too bad the Brothers Grimm couldn't copyright their work for a few hundred years, Disney would never have gotten started.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
it's a bit off topic.. it could possibly be because there was almost no never version of the most common pirated versions of software in 2005? Maybe if larger money hungry software companies make a free version of their software (just watered down of course) people wouldn't need to pirate as much.. I mean look at photoshop. some 14 year old want's to make a website, but that kid can't afford photoshop, but he really can't make graphic in mspaint! so they download a pirated copy of photoshop. And while their in the process of getting it they decide "well, hell i can code html and stuff in notepad, but i think i'll download dreamweaver" it's a downward spiral! if there were watered down free versions of software more available i believe that pirating would show a loss (in software that is). as for music, i think if the DRM crap went away you'd see more people buying music personally i don't want to go pay $10 for a cd that i can only listen too on my home computer, maybe i want to rip it to mp3 and take it to work and listen to it there, or maybe i want to burn a disk of mp3's to listen to in my car's mp3 player. one thing i do know is that mp3s that i download have no problem playing where ever and whenever i want all said and done, the locks only keep the honest people out, because as long as there's a new lock there's someone that can pick it...
I'm betting a lot of people download stuff that they'd never buy in the first place, P2P or no P2P. To call every instance of that a Lost Sale and value it at iTunes monopoly pricing is absolute Fraud!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Ahhh, so you've been talking to this guy, then
Well, my guess is that rather than poorly the stats *entirely* from their rear cavities, they do some form of cross-reference on music sales stats and determine that part of the drop in various regions is due to piracy. So it could be that piracy stats are extrapolated from music sales (or lack thereof) stats, although really all such things could indicate would be a lack of people buying crappy music.
This article was written for the 37 people (all employed by the entertainment industry) who believe any of the entertainment industry numbers. The rest of us know that the entertainment industry P2P loss reports are created with this tool:
http://www.random.org/
"Psst, hey buddy, the post in question is plagiarized and it's 4 years old."
I was the one who originally wrote that post. I lost over 16 million dolllars as a result of its widespread copying, but I won't go into detail as to how I arrived at that number.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
The way many Slashdoters position themselfs in this matter comes from the fact that at the moment, in the IP arena, the Laws of the land are very far from the Ethics of the people.
Copyright infringement is against the law. No doubt about it.
The big question is: Is it ethical to copy something without paying the owners of the IP?
Hence the way the discussions around go - the vast majority of the discussions are not about "Is piracy against the law?" but instead they are about "Is piracy wrong given the way IP rights are given nowadays?"
In this context, the always returning posts condemning the use of the word "theft" when refering to "copyright infringement" are there because ethically and morally, there's a world of difference between "taking something away from somebody else" and "making a copy of something which is owned by somebody else" and because those which say that piracy is "theft" are trying to muddle the waters of the ethical discussion by trying to create in people's minds an association between "copiright infrigement" and "taking something away from somebody else" when in fact, it's actually "making a copy of something which is owned by somebody else".
It's only natural that those which believe that the Law does not reflect anymore the wishes of the people (or in other words, what people think is "right") will ignore or even fight the Law. Around here, that takes the shape of discussions about why IP piracy is not wrong altough it's against the law.
That the claims of lost revenue are inflated are directly relevant to "the elephant." You claim "that piracy is substantial...." How do we know that? Perhaps the impact of piracy is actually quite minor, largely controlled, and has little to no impact on society as a whole. Maybe it's a massive drain on society as a whole. But to make rational decisions we need realistic estimates of the damage, not the inflated numbers that the industry likes to throw around. The industry likes to throw around the inflated numbers because it wants to seem Really Important and convince government to spend more more money defending their profits. This is good for the industry (taxes are used to protect their bottom line), but if the actual damage from piracy is actually relatively low, it's bad for society as it's a handout to business. Take shoplifting, actual theft of product. While it's a serious matter, in reality it's not a major epidemic. We expect stores to largely police themselves, paying for security systems and guards.
Yes, there is an elephant in the room. But is it a mimmoth that industry should deal with themselves, or is a mammoth that requires additional government regulation and expenditure of tax dollars? To make that decision we need realistic numbers.
Search 2010 Gen Con events
Dear Honest Person, Thanks for the clarification, I'll remember that the next time I see one of you low-sharing cunts downloading my 1337 w4r3z and just cut you off. I am fucking Robin Hood and I am creating change, perish the thought that I would steal without merit. Jackass.
Finally, the proof I've been waiting for all this time:
People who listen to Christian Rock are murderous pirates!
Let's round 'em up and get them churning out license plates.
That post should be modded funny. I love this idea of regulating music. Sounds almost as simple as letting people own guns, but keeping them out of the hands of criminals. We can require people to purchase a license before they can listen to music and deputize music store owners, granting them the power to revoke the license. I wouldn't mind at all being pulled over every few days and showing a cop my music license. Awesomeness, let's get right on it.
How can you be a victim of "extortion" when you have freedom of choice to buy or not buy the product in question?
Well, if I were to have naked pictures of you and I told you that I'd give them to all your coworkers if you didn't pay me $100, then you'd be extorted but also have the "choice" of not paying. You don't have to choose. However, if you are a network engineer and trade network diagrams with other companies, both needing to edit those documents, you'll be pretty much out of business if you "choose" to not use Visio. Sure, I could "choose" to be a farmer, but that isn't a convenient choice, just like choosing to have nude pictures delivered to all your coworkers is inconvenient.
Learn to love Alaska
Of course the article meant to write "sighted". The article's author is commenting on an unpublished draft report, which hasn't been published (hence, you know, unpublished). So there's no way he could've meant (or done) the act of "citing". The author infact "sighted" the draft report, that is, he _saw_ it. Before publication. With his own eyes.
Hence, sighted.
No that's me. I see it as the duty of every citizen of a democracy - turning up to be counted and taking part in the democratic process, even if you turn in a blank paper. I think that is part of the reason the worst thing an Australian leader has been hit with is a thrown egg - which strangely enough resulted in the formation of the Australian Federal Police.
If you can yell incoherently at the leader of the country from the side of the road on any morning as he walks past (without fear of arrest) and if you feel you personally have a say in voting him out every three years there is less chance of some loonie taking extreme action.
if you don't adapt to the market you have no chance to survive.
Make your time.
Business Software Association showing $361 million a year of lost sales.
What do you want to bet they won't be claiming that business loss on thier *taxes*?
Perhaps nothing changes for the economy as a whole, but that person may buy what they downloaded instead of something else if they couldn't download it. In this case the producers of the downloaded item have lost profits, though of course not every downloaded item represents a lost sale, there is likely to be some loss.