Slashdot Mirror
Film Studios Seeking Complete Block of Newzbin2 in the UK
superglaze writes "Having got BT, one of the biggest ISPs in the UK, to block the Newzbin2 Usenet site, the Motion Picture Association is now trying to get the same result from all the other major service providers in the country. As this is likely to go through, it won't be long before most people in the UK will be unable to visit file-sharing sites at all, without using a proxy, VPN, or special client."
At the end of the day, they won't be surprised when the ticket sales for the utter crap that they call movies doesn't go up one bit. People who download movies usually cannot afford to go and see them, or refuse to pay the ridiculous prices to see them. Cinemas in the UK are a joke. 7 quid for a coke and popcorn. 8 quid to get in. Take a family of 4 to a cinema and you are out 60 quid ($90 ish). It's a joke. Just to sit there for 90 minutes and watch utter crap. Make cinema affordable for families again and piracy will go down very quickly.
having just read that, it seems, there is no need for smaller ISPs that resell the connection of BT to be blocked (which they wont be it seems).
now, if there is one idea we can steal from patent trolls (if they didn't patent it yet) its making shell companies with no real atributes.
how about making smaller ISPs that do nothing but resell the connection of BT, if they get sued, you drop them and offer the clients to swap to another shell company with no added costs, under the same terms.
it won't be long before most people in the UK will be unable to visit file-sharing sites at all, without using a proxy, VPN, or special client.
That's like saying you soon won't be able to leave your own house - unless you use a door or window. If the Chinese government cannot filter the internet effectively the UK government will have no hope.
And yet the population at large will continue to blissfully re-elect that same old clowns that are helping to slowly tighten the noose/boil us frogs... nothing to see here.
And doubtless it'll be just as effective as BT's blocking has been...
Though I suspect that it's less the awesome skill of the people circumventing it and more that BT have almost certainly found the cheapest way to minimally comply with the court order making it trivial to bypass and the other ISPs will probably do the same.
Yes, this isn't all bad. What this means is that the Average Joe will become somewhat more clueful about how to route around the "damage", and the use of these tools will become more ubiquitous (thereby helping to shield the privacy of those who use them).
And while you're at it, subscribe to Slashdot so you don't see the ads any more. Remember - you have to spend money to save money!
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
The funny thing is that the people that download movies are actually the ones that are going to cinema. And if you anger them enough, instead of going to the cinema for the rare cases there is some relatively good movies, they will actually download them all, and f... them all. And it is easy, there are tons of torrent sites, thousands, and most of them are in countries where you cannot close them (not legally). And finally, lets not forget why P2P, Torrent, etc were invented.. remember remember the 5th of November ........
shhhh, you're disrupting their world view that the USA is the world. you might hurt they're ability to further broad brush over topics....
By forcing the 'net underground they ultimately encourage truly free speech.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
I'm curious - why did they go after Newsbin2? Why not one of the main sites, like Piratebay (I know they're next, but you'd have thought they'd have gone after the big fish first). Unless Newsbin2 is a bigger site than I gave it credit for. I've never really heard of it, even from chatter amongst heavy filesharers and newsgroup users - nzbmatrix, binsearch, etc. all seem a lot more popular.
What did Newsbin2 do to specifically piss off this label?
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
Ah yes, the classical "slippery slope" argument. The problem being that we tend to stop sliding down the slope as soon as the illegal activities run out. Which means everything after hate speech (unless you are trying to do something idiotic like incite a riot or threatening to murder a doctor).
I was a bit concerned in this case because Usenet was involved, which has more legal activity than (say Pirate Bay). Then I looked at the site itself. It is about indexing pirated material. So I'm sorry, but I have no sympathy for the "freedom" advocates here because I'm not into the freedom to commit crimes angle.
Then child porn. Then hate speech. Then speech to create political unrest. Then pro-abortion speech. Then pro-Republican speech.
Um... if you read TFA then you'll see it's actually "First child porn, then file sharing". The fact that you have child porn on that list as if it's something people should be able to access is a little disturbing too.
There needs to be a mass migration to this. It will be difficult, similar to the IPv4 to IPv6 transition, but it will be completely invulnerable to interference. TPB should take the lead by setting up a parallel darknet tracker & torrent site that runs on I2P, that would make it easy for users to start running multiple clients and ease the transition to I2P torrents. Once complete anonymity is possible, uploading will become much more popular, maybe there could be a quick interface for re-seeding old torrents on I2P.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
as soon as the illegal activities run out.
The great thing about the law is that it never changes as it becomes easier to enforce new, more oppressive rules.
Especially in the UK, no advantage was taken of the improvement in computing and communications to create all sorts of draconian surveillance laws which could not even have been dreamt about by, say, former East Germany.
Right?
No the problem is the slope needs to provide enough momentum to get up the next hill. Child porn-- Huge. File sharing-- Not as big, but big enough to argue, with big supporters to help. Hate speech-- hard to argue against, not huge, starting to hit the trough.
At a point you need to convince people that something like Abortion is grotesque, an abomination to the moral fiber of society, etc., if you want to get that blocked. An up-hill battle, and one that needs to start on the way down. The momentum from blocking other shit-we-don't-like gives you that push up the hill. If you can ban political dissent or unpopular political views (start with communism, etc), and still run with that momentum, you can get over the next hill and ride the slope down.
After that, it's just going down. You get ONE point of resistance, one hill to try to roll over. If people will swallow that, you can slide down the next slope FOREVER... or until they all guillotine you.
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Stop watching TV and cancel all magazine subscriptions. When you block these big-money ad channels, you'll find you want less things than you used to.
Ads are all about making you want stuff you didn't want before. Or even knew about before.
Piracy doesn't matter anymore; it's about useless stuff we can live without. Try it yourself if you don't believe me. Toss that TV and cancel all newspaper and mag subs.
If you're that easily swayed by ads then the issue is you yourself.
Are you suggesting that the government should stop people "being able to access" child porn? Be precise in your language and your argument.
Amateurism is way better than the utter shit that Hollywood shits out 98% of the time. Your industry needs to be purged, I welcome its death and rebirth.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Or, more precisely for us un the U.S., banning guns because they kill people.
I'm going way out on a limb here, but in the U.S., I suspect there are many more incidents of crimes committed with the aid of a handgun than there are incidents of self-defense usign a handgun. Banning guns isn't the solution for several reasons, the most salient being that criminals will still have guns from any source willing to sell them, while their victims will not.
Forcing British ISPs to block Newzbin2 is the equivalent of banning the service (Usenet) because it is almost entirely used for what are apparently illegal activities. Apparently being significant also. So rather than tackle each incident, or even ask for blocking of specific content, why, go ahead and kill off the entire service. Kinda sad.
But the British aren't unused to this. After all, in the U.K., owning a handgun isn't a right. Neither is being left alone by your government. And the U.S. is following right behind, sadly.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Yes, god forbid actors make less than the absurd millions they currently earn for less, easier work than some people do every day. If Hollywood salaries were on par with the rest of the country, that would trickle down through the cost of the movies, and people could more easily afford to go out to the theatre, buy DVD's, etc.
Michael J.
Root, God, what is difference?
That's just it. Everyone cries for it to be reborn - but the outcome of that scenario could result in something worse, not something better. I'm not saying changes don't need to be made, but the whole industry dying off will probably not happen.
Karnal
Brits know what Republicans are.
Yeah, I'm not sure that's universally true, actually. We know who your president is, but I suspect at least 50% of UK citizens couldn't tell you which party he represents.
Get free bitcoins: http://freebitco.in
The once united global net will be fractured into small national networks if these legislations spread.
If you download TV shows from unlicensed sources you will see there is no ads.
Maybe that is the problem? It is not really about copyrights but about losing viewers for the ads?
Maybe, but what is the industry going to do if someone manages to invent a box that you attach to your TV, that can record all your shows, let you watch them later, and lets you skip past the commercials? Hypothetically, of course.
It'll be hard for the majority of those working in the creative industries, but we braindead code monkeys, consultants, administrators and documentators create as much content as you do (and coding, conceptual work and finding nasty bugs is creative work), but we write a single bill for it, and are done with it. We don't expect to be paid for the rest of our lives and our heirs for an additional 70 years for it.
If you're that easily swayed by ads then the issue is you yourself.
Try it. You might surprise yourself. It's not that ads are easy to ignore, they are. But even if ignored, they still give you information you don't need.
You just don't know that you don't need it until you try this. It's hard to explain. It's like you've been drunk your whole life, living among other drunks and not knowing anything else. Then you stop drinking and after 6 months you wonder why everything others talk about feel stupid and simple. When drunk, even simple and stupid things feel great. Same thing with watching TV a lot.
In a sense, I agree. You won't find me arguing the moment that they want to block child porn and many forms of hate speech. Keep in mind that all of these acts constitute criminal activities (even, in some cases, copyright infringement).
Beyond that, I don't share your confidence that the slippery slope will continue. There are many losses of freedom that society simply will not tolerate and, even if society did, there are civil liberties organizations that will step up to the ball and fight those battles. And even that makes an underlying cynical assumption that the legislative and judicial branches of government as well as policing is only interested in abolishing freedom. Quite frankly, I believe that most democratic governments are trying to balance the needs for law and order with freedom. (I'm not saying they are always right, just that I don't believe in the cynical view.)
So arguments like this really come down to this: do you want to give the government tools to maintain law and order, or do you want to neuter them and face the consequences of lawlessness?
One of the cases the was on Slashdot a few weeks ago was a catholic priest. Some of the pictures he had were just photograph of (clothed) children with their crotches in the centre of the frame. These were counted as child porn (not to defend the individual in question - there was also evidence that he was molesting the children, but focussing on the pictures rather than the molestation seems wrong).
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
First they blocked the file sharing sites, but I did not speak out because I was not a file-sharer...
Sorry, my points have all been spent.
You might want to pick up a newspaper sometime (if they still in print) because the world has changed a little bit in the last several decades.
There have been some recent developments that you might find interesting, such as the rise of "the internet", "smart phones", "i-things", "unemployment", and "economic uncertainty".
In reading, you might also learn that most of us don't have infinite incomes. Additionally, at the risk of offending some camps, all businesses can't continue to always increase profits for an infinite amount of time.
So the average person has less money to spend on entertainment and more places to spend it, then it seems pretty likely that certain "creative industries" can feel the pinch.
You are in the "creative industry", can't you be more creative than using piracy as a scapegoat?
Increase the use of product placement. Or make the ad breaks shorter but more frequent, so people are less inclined to fetch the remote. In actuality, a bit of both.
it's NOT a "Slippery Slope" argument... it's the "Camel's nose under the tent wall" argument... where you aquiesce to minor increments and pretty soon, you find the entire camel is inside the tent...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
We know who your president is, but I suspect at least 50% of UK citizens couldn't tell you which party he represents.
That's because they're pretty much the same fucking party in all but name...
"Afro-american"!?? You raving racist! It is "melanin-endowed", GOD! This isn't 2003 anymore!
There are many losses of freedom that society simply will not tolerate and, even if society did, there are civil liberties organizations that will step up to the ball and fight those battles.
We here at the TSA whole-heartedly agree, and can attest to the viciousness of people trying to pass airport checkpoints without having their boobs x-ray-goggled and their scrotums squeezed. It was a humbling experience for us when the ACLU obtained a court order forcing us to cease all operations not shown to improve security, both for specific complaints such as humiliation over naked x-rays and groping and for more general complaints about using non-issues as a platform to force travelers into ridiculous and submissive positions so that we can exert control continuously and ensure that they will follow any instruction no matter how much it strips their civil liberties.
At the TSA, we now focus on working with intelligence agencies and on aircraft control strategies. Locked cockpit doors and fast response and escort when a pilot behaves in an unexpected and uncontrolled manner have become the gold standard, and we are strict on airlines that do not enforce these standards. Your convenience and safety are both equal priorities, as they should be.
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Boiling the frog?
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"At a point you need to convince people that something like Abortion is grotesque, an abomination to the moral fiber of society"
Never argued with a pro-lifer before? That's about typical for them. They tend to use holocaust comparisons a lot, but they usually believe abortion is the greater crime.
Child porn is not a reason to allow the government to blatantly mandate block lists for the Internet. Child porn is a reason for the government to monitor such things, but also to arrange stings and traps and to go put an end to human trafficking and to try to stop the child molesters.
The current government line is that each time another person views an image of child porn, that child is victimized again. It's one more victimization of that child for one more person to see it. The current law states that you cannot retrieve any data off a child porn infected computer; it must be quarantined and then DOD secure wiped. All data on the machine is now tainted and nothing of value can be retrieved because it carries the radioactive infection of child pornography. The physical disk is suspect and must go through a complete surface wipe.
Personally, I think a child is mostly victimized when you kidnap them in the night, beat them, stick multiple adult-sized penises up their asses, and then sell them to an underground sex slave operation. I'm not sure the threat of another person handling an image (there are "fuzzy hashing algorithms" used to handle child porn so the image itself is NEVER transmitted or even seen by someone else--the person to see it hides it, reports it, and the investigators never LOOK at it because that would be "victimizing the child again") really stands up to much of this.
By the way, the first effort Slashdot covered for blanket censorship was a child pornography one--and the day it started, the blacklist carried many non-child-pornography addresses, mostly related to file sharing (as an extension--you might share child pornography!).
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but focusing on the pictures rather than the molestation seems wrong
Are we being conditioned to consider the thought as the crime, rather than the act?
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Same trick as the Aussie Simpson's case: If the accused is already a known (Or just heavily suspected) child molester, a jury will want to throw the book at him, and take any excuse no matter how flimsy to do so. So even the most innocent images can be classed as child porn, just to up the sentence a bit more.
And this is why you need some related form of momentum--something to vaguely give that impression as well as something to show that we've accepted such censorship. Those arguments are nutty ... but also not so nutty, really. Abortion is fun because you can make societal arguments like the unintended consequence of ELIMINATING other unintended consequences (i.e. risks) causing a slide of other moral fibers of society, or more real effects like proliferation of STDs. Then again, you could just talk about killing babies. Or both, if you juggle your topics right and get the timing down just so.... Of course, some of that relied on people competently understanding the problem that widespread drug use causes to society--something real, but vague, which people just won't swallow. It's analogous of course to the problem that eliminating the risk of pregnancy causes to society (which is more complex and annoying, and fun to argue about in itself--if the man says abort it, the woman says she wanted to keep it, why the fuck should the man have to pay child support?)
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Don't let their identical DNA fool you...
"Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right" - Salvor Hardin
The industry can't see an arms-race when it's staring them in the face.
This will escalate until file-sharing is done over invite-only darknets. Best
of luck filtering fully encrypted data streams that make a jump or two
across national borders. A DNS blacklist is one thing, but forcing ISPs to
engage in highly costly traffic analysis is something they will fight tooth and nail.
Have a BBQ instead, invite all your neighbors, because it seems like no one knows their neighbors any more.
That sounds horrible.
I dream of the day people stop telling me that I would be happier doing what they enjoy. I don't want to know my neighbors. I hate large gatherings. If there's going to be more than 6 people at a place at any given time, I don't go. My idea of getting everybody together is getting everybody together to watch a movie in my home theater.
Fuck you and your arrogance. You don't see me telling you to stop socializing and go watch TV. Why do you feel the need to tell me what to do?
Or, since this is about the UK, only watch the BBC (which has no ads)
With the amount of content the BBC puts out, it should be possible to completly avoid content that makes these MPAA scumbags money.
Of course it is the greater crime, because fetuses are far more deserving of life than Jews. It's not even a meaningful comparison. Allowing good White Christian babies to be murdered simply because an irresponsible whore mother doesn't want to deal with the entirely negligible and short-lived difficulties of pregnancy and the righteous, purifying, sin-absolving pain of unassisted childbirth is the greatest crime ever perpetrated against humanity. By comparison, justly executing some Jewish criminals, itinerant Gypsy trash, Communist traitors and (most deservedly of all!) disgusting homosexual sex perverts is no problem at all.
Remember kids: the Bible is a literal document, and you should take EVERY WORD* as literal truth precisely as written without any attempt at interpretation. Jesus personally descended form Heaven and wrote the KJV Bible in order to save our souls form heathens and queers and brown people. Disobeying Jesus makes him cry, and you wouldn't want to do that, would you?
* except for those bits where it gets all sappy and starts rambling on about hippy bullshit such as "love" and "compassion" and "do unto others as you would have others do unto you" and "help the poor" and telling us it's wrong to be exorbitantly wealthy and other pussy-ass crap. Feel free to just disregard those parts, they were probably just added in by some kind of faggot or liberal**.
** just kidding! Everybody knows a faggot and a liberal are the same thing, so that last bit is totally redundant!
Praise Jesus! Praise Mammon!
...using a proxy, VPN, or special client.
So there are your first 3 workarounds already. Tells you how effective this is all going to be. Nothing more than harder to detect when it's actually happening now.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I never listened to the White Album, how should I know? Any famous songs on it?
Sarcasm aside, they usually believe abortion is the greater crime just because of the numbers: More fetuses died to abortion than Jews to the holocaust, therefore abortion is the greater crime.
No, instead they'll just sue the fuck out of you.
FC Closer
As highlighted by RevK from AAISP in a recent blog post on the stupidity of the blocking
This post will enter the public domain 70 years after my death, unless Disney buys another extension.
The problem being that we tend to stop sliding down the slope as soon as the illegal activities run out.
So corruption doesn't exist?
Which means everything after hate speech
Not hate speech itself, though? Good. I was almost afraid that someone would say something mean to me! Better ban that!
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
Wait... so I was being brainwashed by advertisements all along!? That must be why I instantly forgot about the commercials soon after they appeared and never actually bought anything I saw in the advertisements. What a sneaky plan they have.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
There's a pill for that.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Actually, the "average person" has plenty to spend on a computer, smartphone, iPod, iPod dock, digital camera, preposterous "Beats" headphones, internet connection and download allowance (for all those cracks), etc etc.
Which doesn't mean that they have money to spend on every single movie or game that they want. Their money is limited (especially after buying all of that, some of which they may need for work).
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
I think that we should start distinguishing between crimes (murder, theft, etc) and illegal actions (using recreational drugs, pirating files, walking on grass, etc). All law is not equal, quite a bit of it is simply someone trying to push his values onto others or profiting at their expense. Copyright law in particular is notoriously corrupt, only existing to profit a few large media corporations. There's no moral obligation whatsoever to obey it.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
The average creative isn't working as a busker - where the audience gets the entertainment and then chooses whether or not to compensate. Also buskers end up getting paid because of proximity guilt. As any creative whose provided their stuff for free on the 'net and thrown up a "tip jar" can tell you - people on the Internet don't feel proximity guilt. Long run? Creatives are working out that people expect to be entertained for free. If that's the case, they might as well be consumers as well rather than producers.
Every time I go to the cinema I swear it will be my last visit. Then over a period of a few months, I figure maybe I was just being a little too picky and arsey, so I try again. And swear that it's the last time.
Between people talking (they don't even bother whispering anymore), stinking foods, the glow of large cellphone screens throughout and damaged speakers that rattle and distort, I can never quite remember why I'm paying to see the film. So I started renting.
But the studios wised up to people like me renting and a number of films I've wanted to watch have been 'Unavailable for rental' from lovefilm. And we don't have any blockbusters near where I live. So I just skip those movies. But I bet loads of people who do want to see them DON'T skip them.
The studios have to understand that the business model has changed. They can't charge what they did in the past because the product isn't the same. The experience is broken, and it's the experience we were paying for.
> but I suspect at least 50% of UK citizens couldn't tell you which party he represents.
That's not because we're stupid. That's just because he's very hard to distinguish from the last terrorist in power.
I didn't say anything about that. All I said was that just because someone has a computer and internet, that does not mean that they have money to spend on every little thing.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
Then child porn. Then hate speech. Then speech to create political unrest. Then pro-abortion speech. Then pro-Republican speech.
In the UK possession of child porn and (serious enough) hate speech are illegal.
"Creating political unrest" is a bit vague, but certainly direct incitement to violence is illegal too.
As someone else says below, we don't care about abortion or Republicans anyway.
We do not have absolute freedom of speech in the UK. What is amusing is that people in the US think they do.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Brits know what Republicans are.
Yeah, I'm not sure that's universally true, actually. We know who your president is, but I suspect at least 50% of UK citizens couldn't tell you which party he represents.
Let me guess, it's a right wing, pro-business, war-mongering party?
Either one then.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
You may say that, but note that we still don't have abortion on demand, but only in cases where there is demonstrable risk to the health of the mother or unborn child.
That may be the technical definition (I do not follow the law that closely), but in practice anyone who wants an abortion can get one. It is a non-issue.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
"Republican" is commonly understood to mean "opposed to Monarchy" or possibly (in some contexts) "in favour of independence for Northern Ireland". Both viewpoints that I suspect the UK government would like to ban, if they could. The word has meaning outside of the US party that took its name.
Republican certainly does not mean "in favour of independence for Northern Ireland". It means "in favour of independence for the whole of Ireland". For an Irish Republican supporter, "Northern Ireland" is as artificial an idea as "Northern Cyprus" is to a Greek Cypriot.
Sorry to be pedantic.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
So arguments like this really come down to this: do you want to give the government tools to maintain law and order, or do you want to neuter them and face the consequences of lawlessness?
A lot of people here would prefer the latter, so that we could go back to the good old days of gun law.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
The current government line is that each time another person views an image of child porn, that child is victimized again
It's not just a fucking "government line", it's one that the victims themselves generally say.
But let's not worry about them, as long as you're free to whack off to whatever pr0n you choose.
Think about this. If there was a video of you being ass-raped by a donkey and some human helpers, would you really be quite happy with the thought of some sicko wanking off over it? Do you really think his freedom to watch what he wants is more important than an attempt to remove that video from circulation as far as possible?
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
If you're that easily swayed by ads then the issue is you yourself.
Try it. You might surprise yourself. It's not that ads are easy to ignore, they are. But even if ignored, they still give you information you don't need.
You just don't know that you don't need it until you try this. It's hard to explain. It's like you've been drunk your whole life, living among other drunks and not knowing anything else. Then you stop drinking and after 6 months you wonder why everything others talk about feel stupid and simple. When drunk, even simple and stupid things feel great. Same thing with watching TV a lot.
You appear to be a highly suggestible adult.
You will now send me all your money. You will now send me all your money. You...
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Amateurism is way better than the utter shit that Hollywood shits out 98% of the time. Your industry needs to be purged, I welcome its death and rebirth.
Ignore Hollywood and there are plenty of low budget high quality films around. But low budget does not mean "totally free" or "completely amateur". Films cost money to make, they need to get something back somewhere.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Yes, god forbid actors make less than the absurd millions they currently earn for less, easier work than some people do every day. If Hollywood salaries were on par with the rest of the country, that would trickle down through the cost of the movies, and people could more easily afford to go out to the theatre, buy DVD's, etc.
Oh, just fuck off, apart from a few Hollywood stars in crappy blockbusters, actors don't make that much money. But they do need to make something to live on.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
coding, conceptual work and finding nasty bugs is creative work
Only in the trivial sense that making a fucking Big Mac is creative work for the person constructing it.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
All real artists would do it even without pay
And all real coders would do their work without pay, so let's just pay all of them minimum wage.. After all, if they were real coders they wouldn't care about the money, so really why pay them any more than legally necessary?
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Actually, the "average person" has plenty to spend on a computer, smartphone, iPod, iPod dock, digital camera, preposterous "Beats" headphones, internet connection and download allowance (for all those cracks), etc etc.
Which doesn't mean that they have money to spend on every single movie or game that they want. Their money is limited (especially after buying all of that, some of which they may need for work).
The fact that you can't afford something doesn't give you the right to help yourself to it for free, just because you can. Unless you live in a society where everything is freely available, which sadly we don't.
There is no good reason why a product that requires money to put it together shouldn't be able to make a return on that money. A film is no different in that respect from a car. No one expects car manufacturers to design cars then just sell them at the marginal cost of production and make no profit.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Support open media and content providers that give away their content through donations
Why? If it's wrong to charge for something your customers can get for free, why is it OK to accept donations for that same thing?
If you genuinely believe that you can happily exist in our current society with little or no money, good for you, but that's not how the rest of us find reality to be.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Have a BBQ instead, invite all your neighbors, because it seems like no one knows their neighbors any more.
That sounds horrible.
I dream of the day people stop telling me that I would be happier doing what they enjoy. I don't want to know my neighbors. I hate large gatherings. If there's going to be more than 6 people at a place at any given time, I don't go. My idea of getting everybody together is getting everybody together to watch a movie in my home theater.
Fuck you and your arrogance. You don't see me telling you to stop socializing and go watch TV. Why do you feel the need to tell me what to do?
I think GP's point wasn't so much that everyone should be forced to socialise in large groups, as that there are plenty of ways of spending your time that don't involve being a passive consumer of junk media. These would include solitary activities like reading real literature, playing a musical instrument, painting wildlife, coding FPS games for the currently under-represented FreeBSD and so on.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
The fact that you can't afford something doesn't give you the right to help yourself to it for free, just because you can.
I agree that it doesn't magically change the law, but as I told the other guy, I wasn't even talking about that. I just meant that the fact that someone has a computer and internet does not mean that they have money to spend.
A film is no different in that respect from a car.
Or pretty much any job in existence (when talking about working for free). The only difference is that you can copy data more easily than you can make a car (and, of course, that pirates are paying absolutely nothing for the product).
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
It's not just a fucking "government line", it's one that the victims themselves generally say. But let's not worry about them, as long as you're free to whack off to whatever pr0n you choose.
Let's try this again.
The current law states that you cannot retrieve any data off a child porn infected computer; it must be quarantined and then DOD secure wiped. All data on the machine is now tainted and nothing of value can be retrieved because it carries the radioactive infection of child pornography. The physical disk is suspect and must go through a complete surface wipe.
What this means: Your virtualization server has one VM that has an illegal image on it. That image could have been anywhere on the disk, so we are going to wipe the ENTIRE server, all virtual machines get trashed.
Further, you aren't allowed to copy ANY files off. It has mission-critical databases? Too bad. The back-up server grabbed a copy of the VM that had that image in it, so it too is now tainted and needs a full wipe; no restoration from back-ups. All data on here has been touched by the Scarlet Swine Flu and has tiny, vicious particles of evil attached to it.
Your SAN carries ALL your corporate data? That whole thing is getting wiped dude.
And during investigation, the entire evidence chain is based on a hash, a number generated from a file. We're not allowed to see the image, or transfer it, or anything; what we do is we run a program that analyzes the image, generates a hash value, and emits THAT as evidence. That number can never transform back into the original image, but we have a database of bad numbers. They're "fuzzy hashes" that will match a tweaked image, so if you alter the tone and insert some noise it should (should) still match. That's all the evidence we have: a number that matches another number, just trust us that number is child porn.
If there was such a video of ME, I would be quite happy with the government seizing it, returning any non-relevant data back to the owners promptly, and retaining the image for legal purposes. Publication is not necessary for this. What has been seen can be relaid, but what has been seen cannot be unseen; someone out there has the ability to relay as much as can be relayed by the next guy already, and if it made the big time on the file sharing networks then the whole damn movie is just lost in the wild.
There are multiple levels of stupidity here. We should be able to non-destructively remove a single image from a media, or sanely recover important non-related data. We should be able to acknowledge the value of having actual evidence, rather than a number someone wrote down that was also previously recorded in a database with no real retention of the source material. But no, we've attached some infectious voodoo magic to bits of data, ones and zeroes, like someone could lay their hand on a .txt file that's 15 bytes long and have visions of a 200 kilobyte image that was on another computer that this file was once on as well.
And in the other direction: Why don't we have the same procedures for dissemination of adult porn? I've seen tons of pictures of over-18 college students "MY GIRLFRIEND PISSED ME OFF HERE ARE HER BOOBS" but they're 22 so it's okay and I can have that even though the victims are crying. The guy that took the picture and distributed it all over the god damn world isn't even arrested for it, and nobody comes to degauss my computer and put me in jail for possession.
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