These companies have spent billions brainwashing us to think that we actually want these things
Horseshit. Do you think that if these companies didn't exist, we would all be content sitting around staring at the walls?
If so, how do you explain the cave paintings in Spain? How about the Canterbury Tales? What about Shakesphere? What about Verdi? What about Beethoven? Were these things popular because of corporate brainwashing?
Ever played peek-a-boo with a baby? Is it possible it is a basic human tendency to want to be entertained?
Seriously now... put down Ayn Rand (who you were obviously brainwashed into reading), and step back into the real world.
Excitebike - NES - One of the first games you could truly edit. My friends and I would spend hours making nasty, yet well designed tracks to race
I have Excitebike in a 10 in 1 Nintendo cabinet (along with Mario Brothers, Super Mario Brothers, and Duck Hunt among others). What a great toy, I gladly sacrifice half of my home office space for it.
sorry, but ignorance of the law is not a reason to reach a not-guilty verdict.
Ahh, but thats the subtle genius of the DMCA. The "safe harbor" clause allows the "offending" party to be safe from prosecution if they "unknownly" violated the DMCA. Thats why the law is used so often, and so effectively - anybody just has to send out a threat (substanciated or otherwise), and 9 times out of 10 the fear of court cases and legal fees will get the desired result - unlike the good ol' days, when somebody actually had to ask a real live judge for an injunction.
Just another example of how the DMCA enriches our lives (not!). So, lucky that clause existed for ElcomSoft, but it doesn't do anything for the rest of the DMCA weary....
No she doesn't. There is no law that says you have to admit who you are and who you work for. It might be unethical, but these days, it seems that more and more so called "professionals" were sick the day they taught ethics in school.
The only tangible benefit I can really see is totally comfort motivated. The laptop has never been that comfortable to work on sitting on the couch.
As usual, Microsoft is taking a nitch and trying to cram it down Joe Sixpack's throat.
I see thousands of uses for a tablet PC - virtual clipboards for loading dock workers, easy access to databases for doctors, ordering tablets for fast food workers, survey workers at the mall, the list goes on...
But I don't think that this is some sort of thing that your average Circuit City consumer will immediately go out and buy, unless of course, they are geeky and want as many computerish toys as possible. Like you said, its not convienent, but most importantly, it doesn't scratch an itch, so to speak. The biggest question Microsoft (and anyone else who wants to sell one of these tings) is: What can a tablet PC for me do that a regular PC cannot?
In short, I don't think the Tablet PC is over hyped, its just being sold to the wrong people.
The bottleneck is not on the internet; it is between the POP and the average consumer, who is generally too stingy to get a faster connection than dialup.
I really don't see stinginess as the reason there. Virtually everybody I know that still uses dialup does so not because of money, but because the service still isn't available to them. At least in my city, there is still way too much copper in them thar lines...
Wireless solutions are taking over the last mile.
Yeah, but wireless is still insecure, and relatively slow. All the providers know that fiber into the home still remains the holy grail of the industry, so to speak. Its not about reading/. via a PC so much any more, as it is about sexy stuff like streaming video, and VoIP, and its about half a dozen devices in your home with a full connection to the outside world. I don't think its to far fetched to think that your average home in the future will require (and use) 10 or 20 times the bandwidth they use today.
Its like my grandfather used to say, good fiber is never wasted....:)
Ah, yes, I see...just like how motherboard venders include sound and video, and as such, the video card and sound card industries flail in lack of funds.
Your sarcasm is misplaced. The road of progress is littered with failed graphics card companies, and the big two (ATI and Nvidia) get by on sales of their chips, not their video cards. And a quick search for sound cards at OfficeMax showed only two cards. Doesn't exactly sound like a growning industry huh?
Thats not to say that video and sound cards don't have their nitches (for example, gaming), but you simply can't make money marketing to a nitch (and especially not at 100 bucks a pop).
When millons of computers are shipped with built in wi-fi, the same thing will happen to the wireless market. Why would a large corporation buy any cards or add-ons when the 2000 PCs it just purchased can handle wi-fi just fine?
for all intents and purposes (I've never understood what "intensive purposes" is supposed to mean)
Speaking as somebody who prides himself on correcting others, I stand corrected myself. I had no idea it was supposed to be "intents and purposes". Despite the fact that I don't agree with any other word you said, I am in your debt for teaching me something new.
Feel free to install another three clients, on me...
Tough shit. They're his CPU cycles, mein Fuhrer, and if you don't like what he's doing with them, you're out of luck.
I personally don't care how somebody spends their cycles - I would rather that they use them for something that I consider more useful, but hey, it is their hardware.
What I object to is the fact that all these SETI@Home people seem to be universal in thinking that this project is so damn important. I'm here to tell you that it really isn't. Finding an "alien signal" isn't going to cure cancer, keep people from starving, or even give you straight teeth and get you laid. In my opinion, there are distributed network projects out there that do have applicable uses to life on Earth, and thereby, I think they are a better use of time.
But hey, I never said you couldn't do whatever you wanted, I'm not trying to be a dicator. But I am reserving the right to think that you are wasting your time and energy, and I reserve the right to call you a fool because of it.
Yeah, I don't have a football team of my own, so I have to put others down.
But rejoice, I have my very own backetball team to be annoyed about - and there is plenty to complain about this year..:)
The Mavericks, on the other hand, are a hell of a team. I saw the two playoff games two years ago where they handed the Jazz their asses in a bucket, and I was very impressed.
That's fine, in itself. I think it's fine to pay people for work they did. But think about all the contributors to MySQL, who were doing it because it was "free" and "open" software. MySQL AB (the company who really does control MySQL) is going to make an awful lot of money from all that work. They wouldn't be backed by Venture Capital money if they weren't. But all those contributors shall see not a cent!
I don't think you understand. Those developers made the contribution out of the kindness of their hearts. Perhaps they found a bug during the course of developing for their own company, or perhaps they did it on their free time. But the important thing is that they gave of their talents with the expectation that they would receive nothing in return save a bit of personal satisfaction.
MySQL AB places no restrictions on the code, it is completely GPLed and open to everybody. Documentation is freely available from a multitude of sources. Not a single developer is being restricted from having his hard work available to the entire world.
But in addition to the free version, the creators of MySQL have offered a way for companies to purchase a license, and thus avoid several GPL issues. On top of that, they have also made the choice to stick out their shingle and offer support sevices for the product, which will probably make some good money as well.
But the important thing that you completely misunderstood was that they had complete freedom under the GPL to do this. And more importantly, so does everybody else. Hell, you could start your own company if you really feel like it.
Nobody is being taken advantage of, because everyone is given the same oppertunities to profit from the code.
My grandmother died of Colon Cancer. As far as I can tell it affects me but, I'de rather help in proving that we are not alone.
Seriously, why? What would ultimate proof of life on some God forsaken planet, near some star thats thousands of light years away do for you? What would it do for your family? What would it do for the whole damn human condition?
The original poster and the parent to your post have a very valid point - there are more important things that could be done with your spare CPU cycles.
The statistical probability that, in your life time, we will discover human equivenent intellegence (which is funny considering that we arn't even the most intellegent creatures on our own planet) is for all intensive purposes, zero. Whereas, the probablity that, once again, in your life time, some of the more potent forms of cancer can be wiped out is very, very high.
I admit, I'm not really too interested in alien life, so I am probably biased, but personally, I feel I could either waste my CPU cycles doing nothing, waste my CPU cycles looking for aliens, or use my CPU cycles to cure cancer.
Yeah, but we don't even know if there is / was life on Mars, and thats right next door. How could we ever even begin to prove that there is life on some remote star someplace (and not only that, but find life that is irresponsible enough to be spewing EM waves all over the damn place? Arn't you the least bit worried that some lifeform is out there judging us based on I Love Lucy?)
I might as well toss a dart at a Hubble picture of a star field for all the good this formula will do.
Nothing but a little thing called "copyright law".
I'm not talking about anything that violates copyright law. What if I tell everyone that your cool new CD burning software will run 3 times faster if you change the 0x02 to 0x06 on line 23 and recompile, but I forget to mention that it will burn out your drive? No copyright law is being broken, but I am still causing headaches for your tech support.
As for the Tom Clancy anology - consider this. Piracy is always going to happen. The goal is to make the piracy irrelevant - in other words, provide a service or product that is easier to buy than to pirate. With source code I can make a clean, 100% digital copy in a matter of seconds. Evil types could have this on the net in a matter of hours, with no fuss. And it would be absolutely idential to the copy that you are selling - in fact, the normal person wouldn't even be able to tell if it was a pirate or the real thing. So why should somebody buy the real thing, if the pirated thing is just the same but free?
In order to get to that same level of quality with a large printed book, you are going to have to do a ton of typing (or scanning - but thats probably *more* work). You can't just tear the cover off or copy the pages and try to sell it - people won't buy it. You must provide as much quality as the original - the source code lets you do that (much like digital MP3s help you provide the same quality music).
When I was a TA I wrote tools to catch cheaters like this. Very easy infringement case.
I'll bet that 90% of all GTK programs look the same to any sort of cheating detection software, becuase they were all created with the same tool (Glade). Its not as easy as you think - a 100 lOC program is not the same as a 10,000 LOC program. A smart programmer and a perl script could turn any source into something completely diferent with a minimum of effort.
documentation and the documentation in windows is so stellar? it is mostly non-existent. oh, that's right, go out and buy teach yourself win..., or win... unleashed, or whatever. and try to find help on line. if FOSS docs are 2nd rate, windows docs are 4th rate.
Documentation isn't just limited to the help files, everyone knows those are bullshit. Documentation is the entire effort of trying to teach somebody how to use a program. "For Dummies.." books, classes, tutorials, the whole shebang. HOWTO files just don't cut it.
product is second rate which products are you using?
Open source products are either first rate or absolutely crappy. There is no middle ground. Luckly, this is the same trend in commercial software, so we've got that going for us, which is nice.
user interface i have both a linux desktop and ibook.
Well, great. Now that you use two of the crappiest user interfaces, you should be ready for anything. Take a step back and look at this stuff we're playing with - it ain't pretty.
You don't support code, you support the binary you shipped.
Nothing would stop some idiot from making a mod, distributing it wildly, and then have every one calling *your* tech support for help.
Only in the same way that Tom Clancey's competitors can take advantage of reading his books.
Wrong, wrong, wrong. The only way I can take advantage of a Tom Clancy book is if I:
A) Tear the cover off and try to sell it anway or B) Retype the whole damn thing from scratch
Software is much easier to copy - a bit of compiling, and bingo - there you go.
And since competitors would be required to disclose source as well, violations would easily be detected.
Hey, free engineering for a weekend of changing variable names and the odd alogrithm? Geez, thats too much for me to handle. I better give up this source code and pay somebody else for the binaries.
You clearly don't know how the Academy works. No film will ever be nominated for Best Picture if it has no chance of actually winning the prize.
Uhh, do *you* know how the Academy works? The members only vote once, you know. The nominees are just the top 5 vote getters. So if the voters generally thought it was one of the top five films of the year, it will probably end up getting nominated, but it probably still wouldn't win.
If you check your cable channels closely, you will see that they offer a pay per view service that allows (using existing remote) to not only to view movies but to stop and/or rewind them.
What you are talking about is VOD - which is actually streaming video over TCP/IP. The content may be delivered over the same coax cable (using cable modem-like techology), but it is definately not the same techology that delivers cable television channels.
A standard cable television setup cannot transmit data upstream. Thats why most boxes have a built in modem that connects to your phone line (for "interactive" ordering of movies) (same goes for satellite too).
You weren't the one downloading the movie/CD, you are legaly making a backup, and allowing other people who also own that movie/cd to get a backup...
That would be the basic argument in the USA, I'm unsure about the Danish argument tho...
And at that point, when they drag everybody in, you simply provide a physical copy of the media for the court. The court says "Great. Next!", and everybody moves on.
But, in the majority of the cases, people are actually stealing the content without owning a copy of the media.
Just broad "what if" comments don't stand up, these days - either you have the physical media (and thereby the license to use it), or you don't. Simple as that.
Slashdot Mirror
Imagine if the Greeks or Egyptians had done this.
Yeah, we would have a bunch of rotting ships on the bottom of the ocean... oh wait....
These companies have spent billions brainwashing us to think that we actually want these things
Horseshit. Do you think that if these companies didn't exist, we would all be content sitting around staring at the walls?
If so, how do you explain the cave paintings in Spain? How about the Canterbury Tales? What about Shakesphere? What about Verdi? What about Beethoven? Were these things popular because of corporate brainwashing?
Ever played peek-a-boo with a baby? Is it possible it is a basic human tendency to want to be entertained?
Seriously now... put down Ayn Rand (who you were obviously brainwashed into reading), and step back into the real world.
Excitebike - NES - One of the first games you could truly edit. My friends and I would spend hours making nasty, yet well designed tracks to race
:)
I have Excitebike in a 10 in 1 Nintendo cabinet (along with Mario Brothers, Super Mario Brothers, and Duck Hunt among others). What a great toy, I gladly sacrifice half of my home office space for it.
Nothing insightful, just bragging...
sorry, but ignorance of the law is not a reason to reach a not-guilty verdict.
Ahh, but thats the subtle genius of the DMCA. The "safe harbor" clause allows the "offending" party to be safe from prosecution if they "unknownly" violated the DMCA. Thats why the law is used so often, and so effectively - anybody just has to send out a threat (substanciated or otherwise), and 9 times out of 10 the fear of court cases and legal fees will get the desired result - unlike the good ol' days, when somebody actually had to ask a real live judge for an injunction.
Just another example of how the DMCA enriches our lives (not!). So, lucky that clause existed for ElcomSoft, but it doesn't do anything for the rest of the DMCA weary....
Get on Amazon and order a whole mess of Linksys WAP 11's.
That would a whole new meaning to the phrase "warchalk".
Google will remain my favourite search-engine but they in my opinion they could be a bit faster in offering new services.
Yeah, you stupid completely free web site! Spend more money and be faster in making new free technology for me to exploit. */sarcasm*
Just be glad for what you have.
But if she works for amazon she *must* say.
No she doesn't. There is no law that says you have to admit who you are and who you work for. It might be unethical, but these days, it seems that more and more so called "professionals" were sick the day they taught ethics in school.
Its sad, but its not a crime.
The only tangible benefit I can really see is totally comfort motivated. The laptop has never been that comfortable to work on sitting on the couch.
As usual, Microsoft is taking a nitch and trying to cram it down Joe Sixpack's throat.
I see thousands of uses for a tablet PC - virtual clipboards for loading dock workers, easy access to databases for doctors, ordering tablets for fast food workers, survey workers at the mall, the list goes on...
But I don't think that this is some sort of thing that your average Circuit City consumer will immediately go out and buy, unless of course, they are geeky and want as many computerish toys as possible. Like you said, its not convienent, but most importantly, it doesn't scratch an itch, so to speak. The biggest question Microsoft (and anyone else who wants to sell one of these tings) is: What can a tablet PC for me do that a regular PC cannot?
In short, I don't think the Tablet PC is over hyped, its just being sold to the wrong people.
Are you better off buying a $49 DVD player on the expectation that it will only last a year or so?
I wouldn't knock the cheap equitpment. Personally, I think that $69 is a really good deal for
this, especially when combined with this feature.
Lets see a $500 dollar Sony player do that!
The bottleneck is not on the internet; it is between the POP and the average consumer, who is generally too stingy to get a faster connection than dialup.
/. via a PC so much any more, as it is about sexy stuff like streaming video, and VoIP, and its about half a dozen devices in your home with a full connection to the outside world. I don't think its to far fetched to think that your average home in the future will require (and use) 10 or 20 times the bandwidth they use today.
:)
I really don't see stinginess as the reason there. Virtually everybody I know that still uses dialup does so not because of money, but because the service still isn't available to them. At least in my city, there is still way too much copper in them thar lines...
Wireless solutions are taking over the last mile.
Yeah, but wireless is still insecure, and relatively slow. All the providers know that fiber into the home still remains the holy grail of the industry, so to speak. Its not about reading
Its like my grandfather used to say, good fiber is never wasted....
Ah, yes, I see...just like how motherboard venders include sound and video, and as such, the video card and sound card industries flail in lack of funds.
Your sarcasm is misplaced. The road of progress is littered with failed graphics card companies, and the big two (ATI and Nvidia) get by on sales of their chips, not their video cards. And a quick search for sound cards at OfficeMax showed only two cards. Doesn't exactly sound like a growning industry huh?
Thats not to say that video and sound cards don't have their nitches (for example, gaming), but you simply can't make money marketing to a nitch (and especially not at 100 bucks a pop).
When millons of computers are shipped with built in wi-fi, the same thing will happen to the wireless market. Why would a large corporation buy any cards or add-ons when the 2000 PCs it just purchased can handle wi-fi just fine?
for all intents and purposes (I've never understood what "intensive purposes" is supposed to mean)
Speaking as somebody who prides himself on correcting others, I stand corrected myself. I had no idea it was supposed to be "intents and purposes". Despite the fact that I don't agree with any other word you said, I am in your debt for teaching me something new.
Feel free to install another three clients, on me...
Tough shit. They're his CPU cycles, mein Fuhrer, and if you don't like what he's doing with them, you're out of luck.
I personally don't care how somebody spends their cycles - I would rather that they use them for something that I consider more useful, but hey, it is their hardware.
What I object to is the fact that all these SETI@Home people seem to be universal in thinking that this project is so damn important. I'm here to tell you that it really isn't. Finding an "alien signal" isn't going to cure cancer, keep people from starving, or even give you straight teeth and get you laid. In my opinion, there are distributed network projects out there that do have applicable uses to life on Earth, and thereby, I think they are a better use of time.
But hey, I never said you couldn't do whatever you wanted, I'm not trying to be a dicator. But I am reserving the right to think that you are wasting your time and energy, and I reserve the right to call you a fool because of it.
xmission eh? Must be a SLC local.
:)
Yeah, I don't have a football team of my own, so I have to put others down.
But rejoice, I have my very own backetball team to be annoyed about - and there is plenty to complain about this year..
The Mavericks, on the other hand, are a hell of a team. I saw the two playoff games two years ago where they handed the Jazz their asses in a bucket, and I was very impressed.
Tge crune us terrubke there (including crimes committed by members of the Dallas Cowboys themselves).
I think you meant The crime is terrible there primarly because of crimes committed by members of the Dallas Cowboys.
Of course, to be fair to angry Dallas fans, most of those guys are not on the team any more.
In fact, to be honest, the biggest crime they ever commit these days is impersonating a professional football team.
*rim shot*
bumpersticker : Slashbot's dogma ran over my karma!
/. I can now die a happy man.
/me is praying that the moderators bother to scroll down this far.
That sir, is the funniest damn thing I have ever read on
That's fine, in itself. I think it's fine to pay people for work they did. But think about all the contributors to MySQL, who were doing it because it was "free" and "open" software. MySQL AB (the company who really does control MySQL) is going to make an awful lot of money from all that work. They wouldn't be backed by Venture Capital money if they weren't. But all those contributors shall see not a cent!
I don't think you understand. Those developers made the contribution out of the kindness of their hearts. Perhaps they found a bug during the course of developing for their own company, or perhaps they did it on their free time. But the important thing is that they gave of their talents with the expectation that they would receive nothing in return save a bit of personal satisfaction.
MySQL AB places no restrictions on the code, it is completely GPLed and open to everybody. Documentation is freely available from a multitude of sources. Not a single developer is being restricted from having his hard work available to the entire world.
But in addition to the free version, the creators of MySQL have offered a way for companies to purchase a license, and thus avoid several GPL issues. On top of that, they have also made the choice to stick out their shingle and offer support sevices for the product, which will probably make some good money as well.
But the important thing that you completely misunderstood was that they had complete freedom under the GPL to do this. And more importantly, so does everybody else. Hell, you could start your own company if you really feel like it.
Nobody is being taken advantage of, because everyone is given the same oppertunities to profit from the code.
My grandmother died of Colon Cancer. As far as I can tell it affects me but, I'de rather help in proving that we are not alone.
Seriously, why? What would ultimate proof of life on some God forsaken planet, near some star thats thousands of light years away do for you? What would it do for your family? What would it do for the whole damn human condition?
The original poster and the parent to your post have a very valid point - there are more important things that could be done with your spare CPU cycles.
The statistical probability that, in your life time, we will discover human equivenent intellegence (which is funny considering that we arn't even the most intellegent creatures on our own planet) is for all intensive purposes, zero. Whereas, the probablity that, once again, in your life time, some of the more potent forms of cancer can be wiped out is very, very high.
I admit, I'm not really too interested in alien life, so I am probably biased, but personally, I feel I could either waste my CPU cycles doing nothing, waste my CPU cycles looking for aliens, or use my CPU cycles to cure cancer.
Hmmmm...... Tough choice.
Yeah, but we don't even know if there is / was life on Mars, and thats right next door. How could we ever even begin to prove that there is life on some remote star someplace (and not only that, but find life that is irresponsible enough to be spewing EM waves all over the damn place? Arn't you the least bit worried that some lifeform is out there judging us based on I Love Lucy?)
I might as well toss a dart at a Hubble picture of a star field for all the good this formula will do.
Nothing but a little thing called "copyright law".
I'm not talking about anything that violates copyright law. What if I tell everyone that your cool new CD burning software will run 3 times faster if you change the 0x02 to 0x06 on line 23 and recompile, but I forget to mention that it will burn out your drive? No copyright law is being broken, but I am still causing headaches for your tech support.
As for the Tom Clancy anology - consider this. Piracy is always going to happen. The goal is to make the piracy irrelevant - in other words, provide a service or product that is easier to buy than to pirate. With source code I can make a clean, 100% digital copy in a matter of seconds. Evil types could have this on the net in a matter of hours, with no fuss. And it would be absolutely idential to the copy that you are selling - in fact, the normal person wouldn't even be able to tell if it was a pirate or the real thing. So why should somebody buy the real thing, if the pirated thing is just the same but free?
In order to get to that same level of quality with a large printed book, you are going to have to do a ton of typing (or scanning - but thats probably *more* work). You can't just tear the cover off or copy the pages and try to sell it - people won't buy it. You must provide as much quality as the original - the source code lets you do that (much like digital MP3s help you provide the same quality music).
When I was a TA I wrote tools to catch cheaters like this. Very easy infringement case.
I'll bet that 90% of all GTK programs look the same to any sort of cheating detection software, becuase they were all created with the same tool (Glade). Its not as easy as you think - a 100 lOC program is not the same as a 10,000 LOC program. A smart programmer and a perl script could turn any source into something completely diferent with a minimum of effort.
documentation and the documentation in windows is so stellar? it is mostly non-existent. oh, that's right, go out and buy teach yourself win..., or win... unleashed, or whatever. and try to find help on line. if FOSS docs are 2nd rate, windows docs are 4th rate.
Documentation isn't just limited to the help files, everyone knows those are bullshit. Documentation is the entire effort of trying to teach somebody how to use a program. "For Dummies.." books, classes, tutorials, the whole shebang. HOWTO files just don't cut it.
product is second rate which products are you using?
Open source products are either first rate or absolutely crappy. There is no middle ground. Luckly, this is the same trend in commercial software, so we've got that going for us, which is nice.
user interface i have both a linux desktop and ibook.
Well, great. Now that you use two of the crappiest user interfaces, you should be ready for anything. Take a step back and look at this stuff we're playing with - it ain't pretty.
You don't support code, you support the binary you shipped.
Nothing would stop some idiot from making a mod, distributing it wildly, and then have every one calling *your* tech support for help.
Only in the same way that Tom Clancey's competitors can take advantage of reading his books.
Wrong, wrong, wrong. The only way I can take advantage of a Tom Clancy book is if I:
A) Tear the cover off and try to sell it anway
or
B) Retype the whole damn thing from scratch
Software is much easier to copy - a bit of compiling, and bingo - there you go.
And since competitors would be required to disclose source as well, violations would easily be detected.
Hey, free engineering for a weekend of changing variable names and the odd alogrithm? Geez, thats too much for me to handle. I better give up this source code and pay somebody else for the binaries.
Right....
You clearly don't know how the Academy works. No film will ever be nominated for Best Picture if it has no chance of actually winning the prize.
Uhh, do *you* know how the Academy works? The members only vote once, you know. The nominees are just the top 5 vote getters. So if the voters generally thought it was one of the top five films of the year, it will probably end up getting nominated, but it probably still wouldn't win.
If you check your cable channels closely, you will see that they offer a pay per view service that allows (using existing remote) to not only to view movies but to stop and/or rewind them.
What you are talking about is VOD - which is actually streaming video over TCP/IP. The content may be delivered over the same coax cable (using cable modem-like techology), but it is definately not the same techology that delivers cable television channels.
A standard cable television setup cannot transmit data upstream. Thats why most boxes have a built in modem that connects to your phone line (for "interactive" ordering of movies) (same goes for satellite too).
You weren't the one downloading the movie/CD, you are legaly making a backup, and allowing other people who also own that movie/cd to get a backup...
That would be the basic argument in the USA, I'm unsure about the Danish argument tho...
And at that point, when they drag everybody in, you simply provide a physical copy of the media for the court. The court says "Great. Next!", and everybody moves on.
But, in the majority of the cases, people are actually stealing the content without owning a copy of the media.
Just broad "what if" comments don't stand up, these days - either you have the physical media (and thereby the license to use it), or you don't. Simple as that.