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Anti-Piracy Lawyers Accuse Blind Man of Downloading Films
souravzzz writes "As the mass-lawsuits against BitTorrent users in the United States drag on, detail on the collateral damage this extortion-like scheme is costing becomes clear. It is likely that thousands of people have been wrongfully accused of sharing copyrighted material, yet they see no other option than to pay up. One of the cases that stands out is that of a California man who's incapable of watching the adult film he is accused of sharing because he is legally blind."
What if the movie he downloaded caused his blindness in the first place!? Check his palms!
So what? Why is him being blind mean he couldn't have still downloaded it? Does his blindness somehow make him unable to download movies as opposed to any other type of file? If someone is deaf does that mean there is no possibly way they could have downloaded cds?
Was the film in braille?
the guy is legally blind because of all the porn he downloaded and the activity he presumably would have partook in afterward?
Uh, you are aware that he is accused of SHARING the movie, not watching it, right? Being sighted is not a requirement for sharing a movie.
According to TFA the "accused" works in the "network security division of a Seattle-area software company"... and yet didn't bother putting a password on his WiFi? Besides, maybe he just downloaded it for the music...
Maybe he just wanted to listen to the deep conversation and intricate plot points. You know, just like some people buy playboy to read the articles...
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
He may be blind, but I'm sure his hearing is excellent!
Cum shot residue?
vos nescitis quicquam, nec cogitatis quia expedit nobis ut unus moriatur homo pro populo et non tota gens pereat.
http://www.tvlicensing.co.uk/check-if-you-need-one/for-your-home/blindseverely-sight-impaired-aud5/
from the page ..
You can get a 50% reduction on the TV Licence fee if you’re blind/severely sight impaired.
Your licence will also cover anyone who lives with you.
You need a TV Licence if you wish to watch or record television programmes as they're being
shown on TV. This includes the use of devices such as a TV, computer, mobile phone,
games console, digital box or DVD/VHS recorder.
the network-security professional recounts the rookie mistake that got him into this mess.
"I didn't have time to set up the wireless network in my old apartment,"
This is not a mistake. Providing a free wireless Internet connection to neighbors is legal. An IP address is not a person.
Currently the minimal threshold for filing suit is way too low. The "rights holders" here surely have some colorable claim that infringement happened (i.e. some kind of network monitoring log, and a claim from an ISP that the monitored IP address belonged to this guy). So far US courts have decided that this is enough to file a lawsuit, something which creates a lot of work for lawyers and greatly advantages those who file extortionate suits -- the cost of actually defending a suit like this (tends of thousands of dollars) is much higher than the cost of settling. Worse, by filing suit the plaintiffs get the right to use the courts to coerce the defendant into assisting in the investigation (and to pay the costs of that!).
A second problem is that even if you are successful in defending a lawsuit you are unlikely to get your legal (let alone indirect) costs reimbursed.
So, the solution is: first, to require more evidence before a lawsuit can be filed, and, second, to make cost shifting the default when a lawsuit is dismissed on the pleading.
He's worried that the downloaded porn could jeopardize his Network Security job?
I'd be more worried about them finding out about the unsecured home wireless he's blaming for his 'unwholesome' listening habits.
tl;dr
warning pointless sig
Just because someone is legally blind, does not mean they have no sight whatsoever. There is a massive difference. I do know people who are legally blind who download and watch plenty of things. They can see, but just not very well. It is possible this guy could watch porn, he just can't legally drive a car.
So far they've brought lawsuits on dead people, children, and now a blind guy. What's next, someone who doesn't even own a computer? Oh wait, they totally did that already.
Playing devil's advocate here, but did it occur to anyone that maybe he downloaded it for the audio? A solid audio track can let the imagination run wild :)
Why on earth would anyone make the assumption that a man is incapable of watching a movie because he is legally blind? First off, the standard for being legally blind includes a wide range of low vision conditions that would most certainly make it possible for the person to watch movies visually. Secondly, even totally blind people often enjoy movies (and will use the idiom of 'watching' a movie routinely) because many movies can be enjoyed quite well without being able to visually see them (sometimes with minor or moderate verbal commentary from a friend or so).
Clearly, visual impairment and blindness is still majorly misunderstood.
There are plenty of reason why a blind individual could be downloading porn. Audio being one. Or for boosting ratio. Or just for the heck of sharing. Maybe he downloaded it for a friend? Maybe his neighbor was using his internet connection. Hell, maybe it was his wife. There are plenty of reasons, even if they are stupid ones. I'm all for torrenting, but to think someone is innocent because they downloaded a movie they can't see is just stupid.
I would be cautious about that, some ISP contracts do require you to take steps to secure your wireless if you have one, and otherwise make you agree to be liable to anything that happens with the internet access they are providing to you.
It may not be a crime, per se, but it can be illegal as a contract violation.
"tracked his Internet protocol (IP) address, the unique number assigned to a computer when it connects to the Web"
"The amusement quickly turned to anxiety. Doe, then living in Santa Clara, Calif., had just accepted a job in the network-security division of a Seattle software company. (He is able to work using a pair of computer programs that read his e-mails aloud and magnify a portion of his computer screen.) The mere suggestion that he swaps illicit smut online could jeopardize his career."
"'I didn't have time to set up the wireless network in my old apartment,' he says. 'I was working 18-hour days so I just told my wife to go to Best Buy and pick up a router. She installed it, hit next, next, finish, and boom, that was it. We lived in a very upscale building, there was no riffraff. We just assumed we didn't have anything to worry about.'"
Isn't the fact that he's working in network security and didn't secure his own wireless network, assuming there was nothing to worry about, much more damaging to his career than whatever porn he may or may not have pirated.
A former RIAA lobbyist, Beryl Howell, is a now a federal judge ruling on these copyright extortion cases and siding with the extortionists:
This appointment mischief was covered previouslyon Slashdot.
As pointed out previously, Beryl Howard is a Obama appointee, and not his first RIAA appointee.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
I've had enough of this. From now on I won't pay anything for "artistic work". Stupid fucks. Any artist here? Tough luck. Get a job.
In anticipation of the innovation of digital "Smell-o-Vision", by pornographers.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
For those that do use bittorrent for movies, why do you still do it ? The question isn't about the propriety but rather the risk. It takes a $1 to rent a movie from Redbox and about an hour to rip it on a Core i7. That's as opposed to 3 hour/day/months to download it from the Net and you could wind up getting a bad encode as well as a case of the lawyer - ISP crabs. Granted Redbox doesn't do porn, but places like SugarDVD do and you get to choose what you want.
The authors of the article still don't get it. They talk as if suing 1000s of Does is a bad answer to the problem of how to enforce copyright. Despite the critical tone of the article, they still worship at the altar of Holy Copyright, and never question the law itself, just the tactics of the lawers.
Copyright isn't the goal, copyright is the problem. The goal is to encourage progress in the arts and sciences. Copyright is only a means, one that always had a lot of problems, and which now works so poorly that it should be replaced.
The question isn't about the propriety but rather the risk.
The risk is probably pretty small if you know what you're doing.
It takes a $1 to rent a movie from Redbox and about an hour to rip it on a Core i7.
Well, for people that do pirate these movies, they might not want to make any trips or sign up for any services. Or, if they're "greedy" by most peoples' standards, they might just want to save a dollar.
And perhaps the time it takes them to download it and such is irrelevant to them. All they're really doing most of that time is waiting, and typically, they can do other things while they wait. Maybe it just doesn't matter to them if it'll take a bit longer.
and you could wind up getting a bad encode
Probably not likely if you pay attention to comments (assuming they exist).
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
If you don't do it, that won't get rid of your risk. Cue the stories about people without computers being sued.
He can see the movie magically in his head as it plays. He envisions the movie's "psychic vibe rays" in the air as it is projected across to the wall. He can do this in real time, before the light actually hits the wall, so he can see the movie's end before anyone else can. All good psychics can, you know!
For those that do use bittorrent for movies, why do you still do it ? The question isn't about the propriety but rather the risk. It takes a $1 to rent a movie from Redbox and about an hour to rip it on a Core i7. That's as opposed to 3 hour/day/months to download it from the Net and you could wind up getting a bad encode as well as a case of the lawyer - ISP crabs. Granted Redbox doesn't do porn, but places like SugarDVD do and you get to choose what you want.
If you live in a country with decent internet speeds/prices and use private trackers, it takes 5-10 mins to download a 20 minute porn scene in 1920x1080 resolution (about 500-600mb)... or so I have heard :p
Private trackers have a very low risk of "ISP crabs" and usually have screenshots and comments so you can see if the quality is good. Anyway, who actually pays for porn?
That just legal excess playing stupid to get people worked up...
legally blind means vision is too impaired to drive, etc... it does not mean he cannot see colors, shapes, movement... "legally bilind" is not sufficient to rule out enjoyment of porn films... adtually, legally blind people can see with powerful eye glasses in many cases, or other vision augmenting systems.
"because of the nature of the swarm downloads . . . every infringer is simultaneously stealing copyrighted material."
No, not stealing. Stealing copyrighted material is going into the store and shoplifting a DVD. Don't they teach grammar in law school?
A fair point, but that number is probably small compared to the ones who were actually downloading.
...because of the loss of 'civic virtue'. Me, I'm trying to figure out whether the institutionalized acceptance of any immoral act as long as it is for profit is a separate and distinct cause, or just a symptom of the loss of 'civic virtue'.
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
I think the biggest reason people pirate movies is simply convenience. It's the same reason people use Redbox and Netflix. The problem with Redbox is the selection is extremely limited. It really only works if you are interested in the newest and most popular movies. Redbox also requires a physical trip, and while a few mile drive may not seem like much, a few miles is still a lot more than none (particularly if you live through Minnesota winters like me).
Netflix has a lot better selection, but it still doesn't come anywhere close to what is available to pirate (there are even out-of-print movies). A lot of Netflix's movies aren't available for streaming either, so a 15min torrent download is about 2 days faster than waiting 2 days for mail. I'm not sure what kind of internet you have that it takes days to download a movie, but a typical ripped/encoded movie torrent is only about 2GB.
Now I'm not saying these reasons excuse/justify movie piracy, I'm just giving some thoughts on why people still do it. I bet a lot of people don't even know about these anti-piracy lawsuits either (it seems like common knowledge to a slashdot user), and probably assume they aren't going to be sued for millions of dollars because that would be insane. ;)
1. Small private trackers -- I don't see any reason MAFIAA agents can't infiltrate private trackers (despite the bullshit some people spew about "entrapment"), but they go for the big places where they can catch more pirates for the same efforts.
2. How the fuck do you get months? Even on dialup, you could transfer a 1.4GB 720p x264 in under 3 days; at 1 Mb/s it's less than 4 hours, and anything over 2Mb/s is basically real-time (i.e. torrent the next movie while you're watching this one, or use a seedbox to leech one down in 10 minutes, then stream it direct). Of course, with a fast connection you'll probably spring for a 4.4GB 1080p version, but it's still not an issue, since you don't watch movies 24 hours a day. rsync and cron are your friends!
(To be fair: I do spend nearly the cost of a streaming-only Netflix subscription on extra disk space for my VPS, so I can haul down multi-season TV packs and transfer them at leisure -- if I didn't download movies/TV, I'd still have the VPS, but I'd save that $6 a month on HDD space. But for torrenting single movies, 10 or 20GB is plenty.)
3. Bad encodes? Oh, don't tell me, you've only ever used public trackers. Get on any private tracker, and you won't have to worry about that -- people who upload shit get their uploading permissions revoked.
legally blind != blind
Private trackers have a very low risk of "ISP crabs" and usually have screenshots and comments so you can see if the quality is good.
My experience is that only newer stuff is available at reasonable speeds. Most seeders stop seeding soon after their share ratio gets over one and that really hurts the longevity of less popular or older data. Nothing's worse than getting >90% of a a huge file only to have the last seeder with a full file drop off. Second, there's no such thing as a safe private tracker unless you're the only one who has access, along the same lines of the only way to keep a secret is not to tell anyone. Once you start adding people, even those you know well, the risk of a compromise goes up. If unknowns are ever added, then it's definitely not safe. That's compounded by the fact you need a reasonably sized population to get enough variety and seeders to make it worthwhile.
All that aside, I think the risk with bittorrent is too great now and getting worse. 100,000 users in the United States were sued last year and while most may get off, that's a large number compared to the number of people who actually use bittorrent in the U.S. . As money is made of these cases, you can expect that count and the number of lawyers participating to go up. Combined with the shame of being caught downloading porn, and I have no doubt you'll soon see some porn studios using shills to release their warez on the Net with the express purpose of suing those who download it.
( Meant as food for thought. I am not telling anyone what they should or shouldn't do).
...you insensitive clods. Legally blind means visual acuity of 20/200 or less on the Snellen scale. Movies are still quite watchable, albeit at 10+ times closer to the screen than normal viewing distance.
See!? 2GB / 2 days = 12.13 kB/s. Netflix is barely better than dial-up!
I have left slashdot and am now on Soylent News. FUCK YOU DICE.
How crappy is your internet?
An average 700mb movie takes 10 minutes, TOPS to download.
Also, streaming. That includes porn.
... in these types of cases, if you are accused and win, the accuser needs to have to pay all legal fees, and a fine of 1 Million dollars. That would take away the lawyer's incentive, as well as incentivize the accused to fight the allegations.
I know for a fact atleast some blind people go to the movies because they can still hear the story.
Some movies (with actual stories and dialog) are better suited for this than others (from Hollywood), but the sounds of a typical porn might just get the job done for some blind folk.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
There's a quote I'd like to single out in that article from Voltage Pictures:
Essentially, because of the nature of the swarm downloads as described above, every infringer is simultaneously stealing copyrighted material from many ISPs in numerous jurisdictions around the country.
Next time somebody claims that downloading a film is analogous to stealing a car, I'm going to throw this one at them. "But I'm simultaneously stealing the car with a network of over 20, 000 of my peers, and each time one of them steals the car it creates a new car which is physically identical".
We need a term for copyright trolls - if they can compare duplicating data to the practise of attacking and robbing ships at sea, surely we can throw a dictionary of FUD analogies at them, right?
"The most dangerous enemy of a better solution is an existing codebase that is just good enough." -- Eric S. Raymond
Uhh.. you are aware that Redbox has a quite small collection of movies? Not everyone wants to watch the popular hollywood movies from 6 months ago.
I did know some blind people, granted fully blind as in being unable to see anything at all and while they did indeed hear tv and movies they did so mostly to fit in. It just isn't a medium aimed at them. Just as a deaf person might go to a concert just to experience it so he at least has some idea what everyone else is talking about or someone with no taste might go to a fine restaurant because that is where the party is being held.
The idea that a person with a very high degree of blindness watches porn is not completely insane but it is highly unlikely. It is described in the article just how blind he is, note he has to have his email read out to him. So he obviously can't even READ pure text comfortable enough, the magnyfying probably allows him to see buttons and hit checkboxes.
It is a different world, not completely seperate but there is a difference to listening to a movie so you can talk to your seeing friends AND listening to porn in private.
Just because some legally blind people can see something doesn't mean all can. 99% blind is damned fucking blind.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Answer: there is no Redbox DVD rental service in my location, you insensitive clod. :) The (legal) DVD stores in my location only sells old movies. The legal stores have actually reduced their price to match the price of an illegal DVD, but they still don't have the advantage of being able to sell the latest movies.
He's a "network-security professional", but his alibi is that he left his wireless router open? That seems more contradictory than a blind man downloading a porn film.
Web Hosting I like the design of your blog very much. It looks like a page from fairy tale. I’m really impressed!
It works out a lot quicker and easier for me to download a film than to get hold of the dvd and then spend time ripping it and then take the dvd back. A popular film will download in about 30-40 minutes. It's also less work involved to search for a film, click on a link or two to download it and come back a while later to find it all ready.
If you're careful, there's only minimal risk involved and of course you realise that ripping a dvd is still copyright infringement, although you'd have to be unlucky to get caught doing that.
Another consideration is the availability of new or rare films. Often, a dvd isn't released in my country (UK) whereas it's easily available to download - guess whether I'll bother waiting or just click, download and watch.
As a user of private trackers exclusively, these are the reasons I continue to torrent movies:
1. my ISP doesn't harass bittorrent users, so no trouble there
2. Netflix Streaming and Redbox have a pitiful selection. To stage a comparison, the size of the Netflix catalog is something close to 12,000 titles including movies and TV shows. One of the three trackers I use for movies (no TV shows) currently has over 43,000 movies across several formats to make up over 73,000 torrents.
4. I have a good, fast Internet connection. If I don't throttle my own use, I get download speeds of 2.5 MiB/s (yes, big-B). Well-seeded torrents are FAST. This means I can be out on a walk with friends, hear about an interesting film, set it to download on my home computer using my smartphone, and have it ready to watch by the time we get back to my house in 30 minutes.
5. I'm still a student, and don't have a permanent job. Sometimes I have no income at all, and for that reason I avoid most monthly recurring expenses.
To address your specific observations about problems with torrenting: I don't download, buy, or rent porn; my downloads do usually not take even 3 hours, and never several days; bad encodes aren't a problem on actively managed private trackers— on the one I used in a previous example, not only are the encodes all verifiably good, but almost every film available comes with subtitles on the site or embedded in the video container.
As for the risk of getting caught: the membership on good, private trackers is exclusive, and very paranoid. Depending on your offense, getting banned can result in the banning of your invite tree as well as your parent member's entire invite tree. Such bans also extend to other sites, as the admins of different trackers know each other. Using different usernames on different sites won't necessarily save you from a cross-site ban, either, because trackers which have interview processes require that you disclose all other memberships to them during the application. Failing to do so is one of the offenses that typically results in one of these megabans. And of course, the logs tell stories that the admins can tell each other. Perhaps as another measure to avoid infiltration, such sites also sometimes employ an IP block blacklist similar to PeerBlock's in filtering their own membership.
Finally, since users on these sites have modern torrent clients (each tracker has a whitelist of allowed clients), almost all nodes allow encryption, so using encrypted peers only doesn't cripple your download speed too badly. The privacy of membership all but negates the risk of the usual MPAA honeypot entrapment, and encryption + noise severely impedes attempts at packet analysis systems (like the one at my university).
Oh! And of course there's this: private trackers often comprise the most enthusiastic lovers of art you'll find anywhere. Music trackers are filled with critics, producers, artists, and generally people of broad, nuanced taste. Movie trackers make a great place to discover new films, or even entire genres, for much the same reason. Netflix, for all it's convenience, ain't cookin' with love. ;-)
Ah the fucked up US judicial system.
How about the filing magistrates only accepting REAL, plausible damages (using common sense) when taking on a case and not some imaginary sum thought up by a greedy lawyer ?
ex : illegal download of Latex Bimbos in Maple Syrup 7, that's REAL damage to "copyright" (which could be dismissed as having no claim because of obscenity and no artistic merit but that's another argument) owner of 25$. Seeded it 20 times to others ? 25x20=500$ worth of damages. Minimum sum of damages to go to court : 3000$, so not receivable by a regular court. Try judge Judy then maybe ?
You suppose that RedBox has the kind of material that I or others want to pirate.
Personally, I used to watch a lot of anime. Anime companies rarely sue, so the risk was very low anyway, even if RedBox might one day have a series I'm interested in a few years after it gets commercially released. (And before you say, "Crunchyroll," they don't have everything and don't always have a translation I like on the things they do.)
The person in the article was accused of downloading porn. Porn isn't that available at RedBox either, and not everyone wants their name (via credit card) associated with their porn habits or browse some creepy ass store.
Even with mainstream movies, there's always the itch to watch something that isn't hot or recent.
MPAA doesn't do anything Disney doesn't want it to do.
Same for "doesn't see anything good having come from the internet. Period." Sony.
Let's start giving credit where credit is due.
Pierce the sockpuppet veil! No more "We can be as evil as we want. We just do it with a wholly own subsidiary, and people are so dumb they won't associated with our brand".
It's not "MPAA" that's being slime, it's "MPAA/Disney". Or "MPAA (including Viacom, owner of MTV and Nickelodeon)". Disney, being the most concerned with its image, is the low hanging fruit. It's also largest.
Similarly, anytime the MAFIAA mention starving artists, post comments on Hollywood accounting. http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100708/02510310122.shtml
We can't make them not evil. But we can force them to work at it a little harder.
And maybe, just maybe, avoid having another US presidential administration quite as completely owned as this one.
Seeing those numbers reinforce my suspicion that ISP backends in US are set up based on numbers gathered in the dial-up era, while the usage pattern have changed.
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
"Who's to say he didn't get turned on by the moaning?"
Most porn aficionados turn off the sound to porn movies; they find it distracting.
about what a blind person can or cannot do
it's basically the same thing as racism
They also found him with some other items, a few baseball cards, a sack of marbles,
[cough]
Petey
Ohhhhh, Baby!
Yes!
YES
By this reasoning a porch light is illegal because it might be used for an illegal activity. And be sure to not help your neighbor as that could get you into deep trouble.
Providing Internet access can improve the quality of life and save lives. You have a moral obligation to provide access to your neighbors using an access point that supports guest access.
Our communities are more important than the off chance the RIAA will prey upon you.
This is a case of blind justice.
People pay for phone sex, so the fact that he can only hear the videos doesn't necessarily mean he couldn't enjoy them. Seems unlikely, though.
3 hours? What are you on, dialup?
I wanted to watch a several year old movie that was showing the other day Starz on Demand. I've been having problems with some channels breaking up with my cable provider, and the particular channel it was being streamed to me on made the VOD pause for about 3 seconds every 20 seconds or so. It was annoying. I ended up just downloading it as a xvid video in about 5 minutes. It would take me that long to get my shoes on and walk out to the car, let alone drive down to the nearest Redbox if they even had it. If I wanted the 1080p BD rip, it would have taken about 30 minutes.
It's not about the money. It's about the convenience.
How the fuck do you get months?
I get months on some rare files that are seeded by one or maybe two who appear to be effectively on dial up and are dropping off/coming back, the way they limit their upload speeds. No, it doesn't happen on most files, but it does happen.
First:
"He is able to work using a pair of computer programs that read his e-mails aloud and magnify a portion of his computer screen."
Then:
"At least at the outset, he could remain anonymous. "
Yeah anonymous among all the other blind people going to work for a security company that uses an e-mail and a special computer screen.
The writer should have left his tools and the fact it's a IT firm.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
In the U.S. If your better eye is 20/200 or worse without aid of contact lens, then you are legally blind. I've known several people who are legally blind who can certainly see well enough to watch movies.
The argument these movies had no value because of his bad eyesight is bad is quite silly, in my opinion.
Free unix account: freeshell.org
Specious argument. People aren't being sued for downloading old out-of-print movies.
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
You do realize women watch porn too right? So what he's blind doesn't mean his wife didn't watch it. Also he freely admits he can see something as he uses screen magnification at work to do his job. Not saying not innocent just it isn't only guys that watch porn and he isn't completely blind either so still a possibility that he did it.
RIFT, that is why and that is all.
Ah, so only poor riffraff would be interested in seeing naked women. Oh how naive.
does redbox/netflix carry porno and the latest tv-series without region discrimination and do you get to keep the file for later date? I thought not.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
the groaning!"
Bukowski said it. I believe it. That settles it.
Force encryption and only download from private trackers. At that point you've got about the same chance to get busted as someone who doesn't pirate at all (as shown in the OP) and get the side benefit of getting a bunch of free shit.
That's fine for DVDs, but if your woman spent $1500 on a TV she wants to see 720p and 1080p stuff. That's what happened to me.
I don't know if Blu-Rays are also as easily rentable as what you described (I simply haven't looked) but the software it takes to read them is rare. AFAIK there's only one: it's proprietary, runs on hardly any platforms, and needs frequent updates to deal with BD+ changes. That makes legit usage of Blu-Rays so inconvenient that it just ain't happening.
DRM killed the high def movie market. It simply won't exist until they do something about this problem.
Then there's a funny chain reaction thing. I's true that you can violate DMCA and watch DVDs in your home without anyone ever knowing, and without you bearing any serious inconvenience. But Blu-Rays (and 'premium' cable TV boxes with their lack of high-def outputs) get you into the pirate infrastructure habit. If you have to use pirate infrastructure (or else abstain watching high-def movies), then you get into the habit of using that infrastructure. At some point you stop thinking before you click, "Wait, is this movie an exception -- something that I could actually get on readable optical disk? Is this movie actually for sale or rental, unlike all recent movies?"
MPAA trained us to pirate. So perversely, DRM (on Blu-Rays and cable TV transmission) has nearly killed the low-def market too!
As for the risk, it's negligible. That isn't to say people aren't at risk of getting settlement "offers", but the relationship between getting letters from lawyers and piracy is loose. Even if you don't pirate, you're just about as likely to get one of those letters as I am.
If MAFIAA wants to stop piracy, they need to kill DRM as soon as possible and widely advertise that they've done so, and formally release the keys on all previously-sold DRMed media (and grant authorization to use them). You can't have a market for stuff people aren't allowed to use. I am not going to buy or rent a movie that I'm not allowed to play or that I have to jump through hoops (i.e. install Windows and AnyDVD) to play. I just have to get something for my money, or else I won't part with that money. It's just common sense.
I bet a lot of people don't even know about these anti-piracy lawsuits either (it seems like common knowledge to a slashdot user), and probably assume they aren't going to be sued for millions of dollars because that would be insane
So you're suggesting that they would have to have gained awareness of what a bit torrent client even is, reasearched and chose one, performed the required internet research to get it properly set up (port forwarding and all) and been aware of, and searched, all the torrent sites for movies to download, without ever crossing paths of a discussion thread indicating that they may get sued, the whole time fully aware that the first thing they see on any movie they ever watched is an anti-piracy warning, and the legal implications thereof?
Wow!! Really?!? You actually believe that is possible?
Oh, btw, I got this bridge for sale, if you're interested. Dirt cheap!!
You know...wink wink, nudge nudge...
"Wanna see how good a blind man is with a computer, I can torrent too baby, yeah - watcha wanna watch, eh?"
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
"I didn't have time to set up the wireless network in my old apartment," he says. "I was working 18-hour days so I just told my wife to go to Best Buy and pick up a router. She installed it, hit next, next, finish, and boom, that was it. We lived in a very upscale building, there was no riffraff. We just assumed we didn't have anything to worry about."
Yes, this is the man that I want working network security. Nope, there's no possible way that this shows any incompetence on his part.
you saying there's some really good stuff amidst all the dreck 4chan is known for?
I wouldn't be surprised; I think the "there's a silver lining in every cloud" metaphor is actually quite accurate.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
Perhaps it is about propriety. My understanding is that you won't get in trouble for downloading (personal gain), but for uploading (giving to the community). If someone really thinks that sharing content with others is morally or ethically a good thing to do, then it stands to reason that giving up the practice because of intimidation just wouldn't be, well, proper.
...)
Not that every torrenter is a saint. The motivation might just be "fuck the man", which amounts to the same thing in a perverse way. Of course, there's always ignorance. The fact that an activity is a bad idea doesn't seem to prevent large numbers of people from engaging in it. (Smoking, any number of bad driving habits, unprotected sex, being belligerent to police, posting compromising photos online, developing in Flash