You forget that virtually no Korean, or Chinese person can understand Japanese. There isn't any noticeable piracy unless one considers the few games that aren't language dependent, and the even fewer games that will be fan translated. But assuming there IS a common language, (like games released in the U.S but not the EU or Australia) then I agree the game maker won't get money and there will be piracy. But considering that distribution and promotion also costs money, it can be economical to just let that happen. I don't really consider cases like these to be punishing anyone, since how can someone want a game they probably don't know exists?
So shouldn't your original statement be amended to "I'm reminded of things like how Japan pretty much refuses to sell games in either China, or Korea due to the language barrier, although they get to use piracy as an excuse."
With the exception of indie works, is there a real difference between artist, and corporate middleman distributor?
What? What kind of question is that? Artists are the people with the actual creative talent who put their time and energy into a creative work. Corporate middleman distributors take ownership of the work and get to keep the vast majority of any profits it makes, in exchange for paying the artist pennies on the dollar and for distributing it. The Internet is taking away the need for the corporate middleman distributor by letting the artist release the work online. Also, artists are not famous for egregious abuses of copyright and harassment of the public, whereas the corporate middleman distributors are. Which one should we be supporting again?
I think you're oversimplifying the pirate demographics. Though I must admit I've no real academic statistics, I've found that in the U.S at least, the younger pirates (13 through college) are the "selfish freeloaders" as you call them with very few exceptions. Those older folks are more ethical, it seems to come with having a full time job.
I'm oversimplifying the pirate demographics?
Things are quite different in Asia (with the maybe exception of Japan), everyone pirates there with no concern for the creators.
Aren't those, you know, really poor countries whose citizens don't want to spend a month's wages on a CD?
Don't be a twat, if morality were purely subjective, there would be nothing wrong with someone being a child rapist and murderer, as long as he thought it was OK.
No, because those actions involve the rape/murder of other people, which copyright infringement doesn't.
The "ethical pirate" argument if I may quote a commenter from that site. They exist all right, but I find the director to be way too optimistic. I'm reminded of things like how Japan pretty much refuses to sell games in either China, or Korea due to the high amount of piracy there. Or how folks use the I'm a poor student excuse while not even tipping a meager dollar towards the media they like. Hopefully we'll culturally evolve so that we feel morally obligated to support works of art we enjoy, but I don't believe we're quite there yet. Bozzo created a socially relevant movie, and a niche movie on a topic interesting to the technologically inclined. I wonder if he would've recouped his loss if he used the 100k from used on his first movie to create a A list game for example.
Refusing to sell a creative work in a certain region guarantees that that work will be pirated and that the creator will earn nothing because there is no legal way to buy the content. How does this teach those pirates a lesson again?
I think you're too critical of the file sharing community. The majority of what Internet trolls will call selfish freeloaders are actually fans who do, in fact, buy content to support the artists (reminder: artists, not corporate middleman distributors) they like. No content industries are dying an agonizing death despite their cries to the contrary, so I'm not sure why you think we're a civilization of people who don't believe in supporting good content creators.
Piracy is to theft as copyrighted works are to property.
In order for one to be true, the other must be true.
If copyrighted works and physical objects are the same, either:
a) Copyright must be perpetual and last forever
b) Your house must eventually become the property of the public (thanks to whichever Slashdotter has this in his sig).
Which do you prefer? Of course, option c is to retract the assertion that piracy is theft.
No matter what side you're on, please don't mention morality being subjective. That's obvious to everyone, and comes across as a mild insult, or pointless padding at best.
Then the person to whom I replied also made a mild insult when he made a blanket statement that piracy is immoral, did he not?
I (and everyone else here probably) has at least an inkling on how bad copyright abuse can be. But in all likelihood kiwimate was referring to the other side of the coin where individuals would download media days before/after it's release (the whole "why two wrongs make a right" line) which I think most here would find objectionable.
Really? What's wrong with it? This interview with movie director Sam Bozzo gives an interesting perspective on pre-release leaks. Essentially, he says that the only works (in his case, movies) that are actually harmed by pre-release leaks are mediocre or bad movies that rely on hype and marketing to bring people into the theater. Pre-release leaks allow people to determine for themselves whether a certain movie is good or bad, and let's not forget that the experience of seeing a movie in the theater cannot be pirated, so it's entirely likely that good movies that are leaked online prior to release will draw in a larger audience than those that don't leak. Bad movies, on the other hand, will financially suffer, which is exactly what's supposed to happen.
As for movies that have little in terms of advertising or word-of-mouth, p2p networks help those movies by spreading awareness of them and enlarging the fan base.
Now, taking what isn't yours to take is wrong, no matter what form it takes. Free swag is nice, but it's a bonus, not a right, and certainly not an entitlement. If you're getting away with piracy, then you've got a bonus - but there's no way piracy of a movie, song, game, or book, puts you into the right. It's entertainment, not a cure for cancer. And piracy isn't a protest - writing letters, organizing sit-ins, THOSE are protests.
First of all, the statement "taking what isn't yours to take" uses the loaded word "take" to describe the act of downloading something. This is a word that has its roots in physical objects and the term tends to imply theft when used in an unlawful manner. In order for these terms to apply to digital files, one must have the mindset that a copyrighted work is property in the same sense that a car is property. However, it is not, and treating them similarly is what copyright attempts to accomplish- but our implementation of copyright is heavily challenged these days. Also, you talk about "taking" but you ignore the other half of piracy, which is fans of content sharing that content for free with others. This is a decidedly unselfish act, yet trolls will ignore this and claim that all pirates are merely selfish thieves in their attempts to rile people up.
You're correct in stating that there is no universally recognized right to free content, but the other side of the coin is that the recognized right to control over content that would otherwise be free is, as I said, heavily challenged. The default state of a copyrightable work, when no laws exist to govern its use or distribution, is the public domain- it can be copied by anyone. Copyright, therefore, imposes an arbitrary set of limits on the distribution of content in the hopes of providing more content for everyone. I am in favor of legalizing noncommercial piracy, and if that were to happen, the arbitrary limits with respect to noncommercial downloading and sharing would be lifted. There would still be no recognized right to free content, but effectively there would be.
When you say "it's entertainment, not a cure for cancer," it looks like you're trying to minimize the importance of copyright and from that angle attack those who violate it. Not only is this a self-defeating argument- if copyrighted works were not important, why would piracy of them be?- but it's incorrect in that copyrighted works are important. Sure, a specific movie or music album may not be especially important to society and culture, but taken together, these works are all governed by copyright, which has expanded to include a lot of things over the years. Regardless of whether we choose to see it, or are directly and substantially impacted by it, copyright law has an effect on us all, and that means it's very important that it be fixed.
Finally, I reject your argument that piracy is not a protest. We as people are morally bound to ignore laws that we honestly consider to be unjust. People may choose to do that by using peer-to-peer networks to distribute copyrighted materials because they have a problem with copyright law- and before anyone cuts in claiming that I'm saying all pirates are activists, my point is that anyone who partakes in file sharing is at odds with copyright law one way or another, and that global piracy is the largest indication that copyright needs to be reevaluated. Civil disobedience does not need to be a public, attention-grabbing display in order to be civil disobedience. I consider modern copyright to be unjust in various ways, so I will ignore those aspects of the law that conflict with not only my personal beliefs, but with reality. There may be consequences of that, sure, but I would rather be a pirate and face them than surrender to the existing system and lend my support to people like Uwe Boll, the RIAA, and the US Copyright Group who use these laws to harass and extort the public in the name of financial gain. These people and corporations commit crimes greater in magnitude than any act of online piracy. Supporting them- or simply not opposing them- means condoning an evil, and that's something I won't do.
I think the comparison to the mafia would only work if they went around suing random people. Instead, they're suing people who broke the law. Does the mafia only go after people who break the law?
They're suing people who they claim broke the law. I am mystified by the number of people who just automatically assume that accused = guilty, without applying even a smidgen of critical thought to the matter.
Because they'd rather get involved in endless pedantic debates over the meaning of the word "theft" instead of just manning up and admitting they're choosing to do something illegal and immoral. (Sigh...and usually that will provoke a screamfest - "what's immoral is locking up work which wants to be free...", yabber, yabber, cliche, cliche - instead of an adult response. Can someone please tell me why two wrongs make a right in this case, apparently?)
Illegal? Few people contest that copyright infringement is against the law. But immoral? Morality is subjective. Piracy isn't automatically immoral simply because you say it is, basing your assertion on your beliefs about copyright law. Simply because noncommercial copyright infringement is illegal does not automatically make it wrong, and if you believe otherwise, there is no way to have a rational argument with you.
Before people choose sides in the War on Piracy, they ought to be required to have a basic understanding of copyright law. This lets them have at least a slight grasp on the issue instead of just mindlessly yammering about something they don't understand. And I would personally add that those evil pirates are much harder to demonize when you understand what a clusterfuck modern copyright law is and how it is abused by large corporations.
But since we're commenting on flamebait mods... the whole article is flamebait for slashdot. The only reason this is newsworthy is because it includes Uwe Boll, make of some of the most nerd-despised movies on the planet. It's no longer news when a media rights holder pursues action against infringers -- the only reason this article made the main page is so we can flame (1) entities that pursue enforcement of their IP rights and (2) that director of tripe, Uwe Boll.
I disagree. I had never heard of Uwe Boll until he started his lawsuit campaign. The reason this issue gets under my skin is the egregious abuse of copyright and the court system, not because of the person doing it.
Saying that "it's no longer news when a media rights holder pursues action against infringers" is dangerous- do you want such actions to become the accepted norm?
The GP is talking about actual piracy of GBA games, i.e. bootleg cartridges manufactured by unauthorized/unlicensed agencies, sold at rates lower than retail, of which the copyright owners get nothing.
If the copyright owner is not selling his work in the first place, there is no lost sale. Game Boy Advance games are not being sold by Nintendo anymore; therefore, buying an unauthorized copy of a GBA game does not translate to any sort of loss on Nintendo's part because he couldn't have bought a legit copy otherwise.
I agree that commercial piracy sucks, but let's be sane here.
On the other hand, there is a type of piracy that is a lost sale. I still love the Gameboy Advanced system, and of course they no longer make games for it, so I turn to eBay and the like. More than once I've gotten outright pirated cartridges off of eBay.
Buying (legit) GBA cartridges second-hand on eBay doesn't put any money into Nintendo's hands, so where does the "lost sale" argument come from? Yes, I understand that you would have otherwise gotten a legit copy, but the whole smarmy justification for attacking piracy is that the game companies and such lose money from it. If they wouldn't have gained a cent even if you'd bought a legit copy, the situation doesn't apply.
Of course, I also believe that if a copyrighted work is not being made commercially available, there should be no penalty for distributing it.
however, it's RETARDED to default to saying it's ineffective and should be shut down because they haven't caught a terrorist.
You're correct, but it's anything but to suggest that it ought to be reconsidered, if not shut down, because they haven't caught a terrorist and because the program is having serious ramifications for privacy rights and other individual liberties.
Yet, somehow, there haven't been any more planes bringing down skyscrapers or smashing into the Pentagon. Maybe the showmanship is having the desired effect?
Right, because that sort of thing was so common until the post-9/11 airport security crackdowns. So clearly, since it hasn't happened since then, the mass inconveniences- to put the TSA's tactics lightly- have been worth it, right?
The point is not that an airport official will be watching passengers in an attempt to spot terrorists. The point is that there is a possibility that someone stressed, sick, distracted or socially inept- all of which could make a person seem "suspicious"- will be accosted or even held despite complete innocence of terrorism. It's "security theater" to a T: it gives the appearance of safety and security without actually providing any of the substance.
I've used I2P a little, and it seems like a more mature anonymous network than Freenet, although I've not yet checked out its support for the equivalent of freesites. It also supports things Freenet doesn't, like BitTorrent and IRC. It uses a Tor-like network to relay traffic from node to node.
I know there are those who hype the child porn issue to such an extent that you are labeled a pedo if you post anything less than an extremist attack on child porn, but I'm not so concerned about those people that I need to be anonymous in order to speak out against what I see as retardation incarnate.
Unless you were joking. In which case, lol, i c what u did thar.
What we have here is that a cartoon comedy garners the same reaction as a live action comedy. Why is this different for pornography.
Nobody here is saying that hentai and cartoon porn aren't pornographic. What people are saying is that hentai and cartoon porn are victimless "crimes" and that it's stupid to outlaw them on the grounds of "protecting the children."
Plus, comedies aren't illegal. Live action child porn is.
Slashdot Mirror
So shouldn't your original statement be amended to "I'm reminded of things like how Japan pretty much refuses to sell games in either China, or Korea due to the language barrier, although they get to use piracy as an excuse."
What? What kind of question is that? Artists are the people with the actual creative talent who put their time and energy into a creative work. Corporate middleman distributors take ownership of the work and get to keep the vast majority of any profits it makes, in exchange for paying the artist pennies on the dollar and for distributing it. The Internet is taking away the need for the corporate middleman distributor by letting the artist release the work online. Also, artists are not famous for egregious abuses of copyright and harassment of the public, whereas the corporate middleman distributors are. Which one should we be supporting again?
I'm oversimplifying the pirate demographics?
Aren't those, you know, really poor countries whose citizens don't want to spend a month's wages on a CD?
No, because those actions involve the rape/murder of other people, which copyright infringement doesn't.
Refusing to sell a creative work in a certain region guarantees that that work will be pirated and that the creator will earn nothing because there is no legal way to buy the content. How does this teach those pirates a lesson again?
I think you're too critical of the file sharing community. The majority of what Internet trolls will call selfish freeloaders are actually fans who do, in fact, buy content to support the artists (reminder: artists, not corporate middleman distributors) they like. No content industries are dying an agonizing death despite their cries to the contrary, so I'm not sure why you think we're a civilization of people who don't believe in supporting good content creators.
Piracy is to theft as copyrighted works are to property.
In order for one to be true, the other must be true.
If copyrighted works and physical objects are the same, either:
a) Copyright must be perpetual and last forever
b) Your house must eventually become the property of the public (thanks to whichever Slashdotter has this in his sig).
Which do you prefer? Of course, option c is to retract the assertion that piracy is theft.
Then the person to whom I replied also made a mild insult when he made a blanket statement that piracy is immoral, did he not?
Really? What's wrong with it? This interview with movie director Sam Bozzo gives an interesting perspective on pre-release leaks. Essentially, he says that the only works (in his case, movies) that are actually harmed by pre-release leaks are mediocre or bad movies that rely on hype and marketing to bring people into the theater. Pre-release leaks allow people to determine for themselves whether a certain movie is good or bad, and let's not forget that the experience of seeing a movie in the theater cannot be pirated, so it's entirely likely that good movies that are leaked online prior to release will draw in a larger audience than those that don't leak. Bad movies, on the other hand, will financially suffer, which is exactly what's supposed to happen.
As for movies that have little in terms of advertising or word-of-mouth, p2p networks help those movies by spreading awareness of them and enlarging the fan base.
First of all, the statement "taking what isn't yours to take" uses the loaded word "take" to describe the act of downloading something. This is a word that has its roots in physical objects and the term tends to imply theft when used in an unlawful manner. In order for these terms to apply to digital files, one must have the mindset that a copyrighted work is property in the same sense that a car is property. However, it is not, and treating them similarly is what copyright attempts to accomplish- but our implementation of copyright is heavily challenged these days. Also, you talk about "taking" but you ignore the other half of piracy, which is fans of content sharing that content for free with others. This is a decidedly unselfish act, yet trolls will ignore this and claim that all pirates are merely selfish thieves in their attempts to rile people up.
You're correct in stating that there is no universally recognized right to free content, but the other side of the coin is that the recognized right to control over content that would otherwise be free is, as I said, heavily challenged. The default state of a copyrightable work, when no laws exist to govern its use or distribution, is the public domain- it can be copied by anyone. Copyright, therefore, imposes an arbitrary set of limits on the distribution of content in the hopes of providing more content for everyone. I am in favor of legalizing noncommercial piracy, and if that were to happen, the arbitrary limits with respect to noncommercial downloading and sharing would be lifted. There would still be no recognized right to free content, but effectively there would be.
When you say "it's entertainment, not a cure for cancer," it looks like you're trying to minimize the importance of copyright and from that angle attack those who violate it. Not only is this a self-defeating argument- if copyrighted works were not important, why would piracy of them be?- but it's incorrect in that copyrighted works are important. Sure, a specific movie or music album may not be especially important to society and culture, but taken together, these works are all governed by copyright, which has expanded to include a lot of things over the years. Regardless of whether we choose to see it, or are directly and substantially impacted by it, copyright law has an effect on us all, and that means it's very important that it be fixed.
Finally, I reject your argument that piracy is not a protest. We as people are morally bound to ignore laws that we honestly consider to be unjust. People may choose to do that by using peer-to-peer networks to distribute copyrighted materials because they have a problem with copyright law- and before anyone cuts in claiming that I'm saying all pirates are activists, my point is that anyone who partakes in file sharing is at odds with copyright law one way or another, and that global piracy is the largest indication that copyright needs to be reevaluated. Civil disobedience does not need to be a public, attention-grabbing display in order to be civil disobedience. I consider modern copyright to be unjust in various ways, so I will ignore those aspects of the law that conflict with not only my personal beliefs, but with reality. There may be consequences of that, sure, but I would rather be a pirate and face them than surrender to the existing system and lend my support to people like Uwe Boll, the RIAA, and the US Copyright Group who use these laws to harass and extort the public in the name of financial gain. These people and corporations commit crimes greater in magnitude than any act of online piracy. Supporting them- or simply not opposing them- means condoning an evil, and that's something I won't do.
I, on the other hand, hear far too many cries and justifications (from copyright holders) for being paid without repeatedly producing.
They're suing people who they claim broke the law. I am mystified by the number of people who just automatically assume that accused = guilty, without applying even a smidgen of critical thought to the matter.
Illegal? Few people contest that copyright infringement is against the law. But immoral? Morality is subjective. Piracy isn't automatically immoral simply because you say it is, basing your assertion on your beliefs about copyright law. Simply because noncommercial copyright infringement is illegal does not automatically make it wrong, and if you believe otherwise, there is no way to have a rational argument with you.
Before people choose sides in the War on Piracy, they ought to be required to have a basic understanding of copyright law. This lets them have at least a slight grasp on the issue instead of just mindlessly yammering about something they don't understand. And I would personally add that those evil pirates are much harder to demonize when you understand what a clusterfuck modern copyright law is and how it is abused by large corporations.
Strictly speaking, this doesn't mean these lawsuits won't affect you.
I disagree. I had never heard of Uwe Boll until he started his lawsuit campaign. The reason this issue gets under my skin is the egregious abuse of copyright and the court system, not because of the person doing it.
Saying that "it's no longer news when a media rights holder pursues action against infringers" is dangerous- do you want such actions to become the accepted norm?
More like six bucks, actually. 41.5 billion divided by a population of 7 billion (extremely rough estimate).
If the copyright owner is not selling his work in the first place, there is no lost sale. Game Boy Advance games are not being sold by Nintendo anymore; therefore, buying an unauthorized copy of a GBA game does not translate to any sort of loss on Nintendo's part because he couldn't have bought a legit copy otherwise.
I agree that commercial piracy sucks, but let's be sane here.
Buying (legit) GBA cartridges second-hand on eBay doesn't put any money into Nintendo's hands, so where does the "lost sale" argument come from? Yes, I understand that you would have otherwise gotten a legit copy, but the whole smarmy justification for attacking piracy is that the game companies and such lose money from it. If they wouldn't have gained a cent even if you'd bought a legit copy, the situation doesn't apply.
Of course, I also believe that if a copyrighted work is not being made commercially available, there should be no penalty for distributing it.
You're correct, but it's anything but to suggest that it ought to be reconsidered, if not shut down, because they haven't caught a terrorist and because the program is having serious ramifications for privacy rights and other individual liberties.
Can you demonstrate that we haven't had any more 9/11s because of the TSA, instead of some other factor?
In fact, how many actual terrorists has the TSA caught?
Right, because that sort of thing was so common until the post-9/11 airport security crackdowns. So clearly, since it hasn't happened since then, the mass inconveniences- to put the TSA's tactics lightly- have been worth it, right?
The point is not that an airport official will be watching passengers in an attempt to spot terrorists. The point is that there is a possibility that someone stressed, sick, distracted or socially inept- all of which could make a person seem "suspicious"- will be accosted or even held despite complete innocence of terrorism. It's "security theater" to a T: it gives the appearance of safety and security without actually providing any of the substance.
No, because Google can still keep logs of your searches if you use SSL.
I've used I2P a little, and it seems like a more mature anonymous network than Freenet, although I've not yet checked out its support for the equivalent of freesites. It also supports things Freenet doesn't, like BitTorrent and IRC. It uses a Tor-like network to relay traffic from node to node.
I know there are those who hype the child porn issue to such an extent that you are labeled a pedo if you post anything less than an extremist attack on child porn, but I'm not so concerned about those people that I need to be anonymous in order to speak out against what I see as retardation incarnate.
Unless you were joking. In which case, lol, i c what u did thar.
And yet you post as AC.
Mod this AC up. Channels through which child pornography passes are almost certainly outside the reach of simple monitoring of Google searches.
I guess search engines like StartPage (also known as Ixquick) that don't keep logs of your IP address are gonna see a nice jump in traffic.
What we have here is that a cartoon comedy garners the same reaction as a live action comedy. Why is this different for pornography.
Nobody here is saying that hentai and cartoon porn aren't pornographic. What people are saying is that hentai and cartoon porn are victimless "crimes" and that it's stupid to outlaw them on the grounds of "protecting the children."
Plus, comedies aren't illegal. Live action child porn is.