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Rapidshare Trying To Convert Pirates Into Customers
An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from TorrentFreak:
"The file-hosting service Rapidshare is seeking major entertainment industry partners for an online store [to which links containing infringing material will redirect]. The plan is an attempt to bridge the gap between copyright holders and users of the site who distribute infringing material. Similar to many other companies that operate in the file-sharing business, Rapidshare often finds itself caught between two fires. On the one hand it wants to optimize the user experience, but by doing so they have to respect the rights holders to avoid being continuously dragged to court. To ease the minds of some major executives in the entertainment industry, Rapidshare's General Manager Bobby Chang has revealed an ambitious plan through which copyright holders could benefit from the file-hosting service. At the same time, Chang says that his company will target uploaders of copyrighted material — whom he refers to as criminals — more aggressively."
I'll have to remember that term next time I'm caught shoplifting. "No sir, I'm not a thief. I'm an non-paying customer!"
Don't take life so seriously. No one makes it out alive.
Don't be such a fucking faggot.
That classification is also flawed. What if people sometimes pay, sometimes pirate? You can classify the activity, but not the person.
That classification is also flawed. What if people sometimes pay, sometimes steal from store? You can classify the activity, but not the person.
Look, people, I just ate TWO cans of Nally's Chili. I have anal leakage, and there is this odor of slightly sweet chili and pungent shit. My point? This is more interesting than the article / story.
It's fairly well accepted that IP theft is completely different from physical theft, if no meaningful legal distinction exists.
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
People actually WAIT for games to come out? People who have real lives actually check every day or two, to see if the new version of their favorite game has come out yet? I mean, REAL people, who do things outside of their mama's basement walls? People who actually know members of the opposite sex, participate in some kind of sport now and then, people who pay their way through the world?
I find all of this hard to believe.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
"The present condition of Haiti gives the best possible answer to the question, and, considering the experiment has lasted for a century, perhaps also a conclusive one. For a century the answer has been working itself out there in flesh and blood. The Negro has had his chance, a fair field, and no favor. He has had the most beautiful and fertile of the Caribees for his own; he has had the advantage of excellent French laws; he inherited a made country, with Cap Haitien [A once beautiful town on the north coast of Haiti] for its Paris. . . . Here was a wide land sown with prosperity, a land of wood, water, towns and plantations, and in the midst of it the Black man was turned loose to work out his own salvation. What has he made of the chances that were given to him? . . .
At the end of a hundred years of trial how does the Black man govern himself? What progress has he made? Absolutely none."
--Hesketh Prichard
Except that in the taxi you are using a limited resource, ie there are a finite number of cabs that can be occupied at any given moment. By getting in one you are assuming responsibility to pay for the ride at the end. Riding and not paying consumes resources from the driver that cannot be recovered, and would have otherwise gone to another rider/customer, as well has preventing another customer from having a cab at their disposal to have ridden.
There are an infinite number of pirated copies that can be downloaded, and one person downloading it does not deprive another person the ability to buy it at the store.