As I said at the end of my post:
With our current level of technical skill and technology, there are very few inventions that could not be reverse engineered. Thus there are very few inventions that give the public a good deal on patents.
Kazaa is centralized; all Kazaa queries go through the Kazaa network. So no, the original inventors of the FTP protocol aren't going to be busted - unless they coincidentally happen to be running an illegal warez FTP.
That's what's happening with Sharman. They're not being busted for creating a client that other people use illegally, they're being told to implement blocks on certain traffic that passes through their network. They didn't do the blocks, so instead they pulled access from Australia in order to comply.
And yet there seems to be an awful lot of Open Source code around written by people who work full-time. And I know plenty of people who work in "crappy service jobs", for closer to 40 hours a week, and earn decent money. There's no need to slave away for 12 hours a day.
Nowadays, companies hire scientists for the sole purpose of producing patents. In days gone buy, they hired them for the sole purpose of producing products. Patents have been around for yonks, true, but the current patent-frenzy and huge patent portfolio's have not been, and the system was working fine back then.
I think all patents do is grant a temporary control over a certain field of creation. If we were to eliminate or limit patents then that means in order to be #1 seller, your product has to be the best and decently priced. Of course, there's also marketing in there but that's a whole other subject.
There's two problems I can find with this:
Company A invests time and money building something truly novel and bringing it to market. Company B then makes an exact ripoff and markets it. There are two companies now competing against each other with identical products, but Company B can undercut the original inventor, because Company A has research and development costs to recoup, but Company B does not.
In order to prevent something like the above from happening, Company A will probably try and obfuscate their invention; make it resilient to reverse engineering. When Company A goes out of business (or the original inventor dies, if we're talking about individuals) the knowledge of how to produce the invention disappears off the face of the planet, and the development in that field is set back as people now have to re-invent the invention.
The solution to these is to drastically tighten the current guidelines for obviousness in the patent office. The trick is going to be finding a way to systemetize the analysis of deliberately obfuscated patent claims cost-effectively, and then convincing the government that the long-term benefits to science from a working patent system is more beneficial than money in the patent offices' bank account now, and happy corporations sponsoring them in the next election.
As I posted on another thread, the patent system was not designed to spur people into inventing. Patents or not, people will always be inventing. The patent system was designed to ensure that the way new inventions work will be available, in the future, for other people to build on.
Say I manage to invent some uber-efficient new power cell. Nobody knows how it works, and because my invention is a non-obvious, opening it up and attempting to reverse engineer it is very difficult.
Without a patent system, I sell these power cells and make lots of money. Then a die, and nobody knows how I did it, and the invention is lost. With a patent system, I sell these power cells and make lots of money for a limited time. During that time, I am secure in the knowledge that even if someone else figures out how I did it, I have an exclusive right to that idea. At the end of the period, my exclusive right is revoked, and everyone can now build new inventions on top of my existing power cell (assuming they didn't licence it off me beforehand).
That is how the patent system is supposed to work. It's sort of like a way of mandating open-source for inventions - we'll give you a guaranteed, limited-time monopoly in exchange for telling us how you did it.
The system falls down when non-obvious ideas are patented. In this case, the "schematics for monopoly" deal is a bad deal - society is not interested in the schematics for an obvious invention because, well, it's obvious. But lately patent offices have been making many, many bad deals on behalf of the public, handing out government-sponsored monopolies like they were candy.
I've digressed a little from what I started writing about, so let me just say it again. The patent system is not designed to somehow encourage invention. Inventors will always invent. The patent system is designed to encourage inventors to divulge internal workings that could not be easily inferred from looking at the invention by someone skilled in that area. With our current level of technical skill and technology, there are very few inventions that could not be reverse engineered. Thus there are very few inventions that give the public a good deal on patents.
Yep, we should all teach kids at a young age to expect trash from companies, to never have any expectation that when they buy something, it works, and that when they've been dumped on, they should suck it up like a good little consumer.
Seriously, I'm as sick of whiny brats as anyone else. And I think there are more of them around now then there used to be. But getting upset when something you've been long-expecting fails to deliver isn't whining. It's natural, and when children are upset, it's only natural that they cry.
I don't know about US law, but under Australian law, manufacturers are not responsible for the inappropriate use of their products. All products carry with them an implied warranty of fitness for merchantability and a particular purpose. That is, if you knowingly sell a product that does not perform in the manner in which it is expected to perform*, you are in trouble.
*"the manner in which it is expected to perform" is a bit vague. It is generally understood that the purpose of most products is generally understood - if the company claims the use to which the customer put the product was not one in which it was expected to perform, then it is up to the courts to decide whether or not that is a reasonable claim.
y only experience with the anti-cheating programs is WoW, so I'll just limit myself to that. I don't mind their anti-cheat software for three reasons:
It's doing something to help me out. Other people cheating ruins my gaming experience, this helps to stop people cheating. Compare this to "traditional" spyware, whose only "feature" is (search assistant, IE toolbar, etc) is a tagged-on feature that is not in any way dependant on it's "spying" functionality.
It only runs when the game is running. This is a big one. I don't mind spyware that I can turn off just by running it - I'll just never run it. WoW "spyware" starts up when the game starts, and terminates when you quit.
I trust Blizzard. Hell, I give them my credit card number to play their online game. What are they going to pull off my computer that's going to be more potentially damaging than knowing my CC#? I also have faith in modern online commmunities to dissect such spyware, and notify me when something fishy is going on. Especially in regards to large companies and popular software. As per the recent ruckus with Sony. If Blizzard did anything particularly sneaky with their anti-cheating gizmo, it'd be dissected and posted on slashdot and slashdot-esque sites within a week. This sort of thing helps keep companies (especially companies like Blizzard who, have a very product line) honest.
I'm guessing the government wouldn't administer the WiFi themselves - there's probably a very happy telco out there somewhere looking to get a very fat contract.
So while Bell South might be miffed, there's someone else who will be very happy. Of course, having a state-sponsored telco is a mite bad to free marketeers, but then, when was the last time telecommunications operated as a free market?
When I was a kid, I had chickenpox. My case was an especially severe one, and I was bedridden for a while with high fevers, which we kept down through medication. I just lay in bed in my hypercolour shirt, and when it started to change colour (due to the fever beginning to rise), Mum could tell the meds had worn off and I needed another dose. Better than mucking around with thermometers every half hour or so.
This isn't a reality TV show; it's a documentary. Documentaries have been around for ages, and they aren't designed to entertain in the way films are, they're designed to inform. Geeks probably aren't the target audience for this - we already know most of the stuff they're going to be showing. The target audience are people who don't know the first thing about what goes on when developing software, so that once they've finished watching it, they will have a clue.
Confidentiality agreements are common practice in these sort of arrangements. If there were no CA, then this guy doesn't have a leg to stand on. As soon as I read the story summary, I assumed there was a CA being violated. If EA did sign a CA, and that CA covered the idea he presented, and the idea EA eventually developed came from him and was not demonstrably developed beforehand, then he has a chance of winning. Given he has enough money to field enough lawyers for enough time, of course.
I quite agree with you that people will always invent/compose/code, regardless of patents being present or not. They have for thousands of years prior to patent legislation. And I think the people who came up with the patent system knew that as well. The patent system is not designed to give people an incentive to invent. It's designed to give people an incentive to distribute the way they accomplished their invention. That's why there are provisions about non-obvious inventions - experts in their field can tell how obvious inventions work without the need for a patent, so the trade of "protection for schematics" is a bad deal in those cases.
The patent system is designed to combat the system of "trade secrets" that was quite prevelant before this. I was researching sword-making some time back, and I found something very interesting. Nobody knows how European swords were made any more. At best, they can offer educated guesses. Until recently, nobody could figure out how Damascus steel was forged, and even what they have now is only a likely possibility. You see, sword making was considered a secret art, handed down by one smith to his apprentice, and jealously guarded. When one line of smiths died out, so did all the knowledge they guarded. With every death, knowledge was being lost because people were too scared to share it.
The patent system tries to give people and insurance policy on their inventions Tell us how you did it, and we'll make sure nobody will rip off your invention for the next X years. The public gets the knowledge of how it was done (eventually), the inventor gets a guarantee of exclusivity (which he would not normally have gotten, even if he kept his invention secret - other people could reverse engineer it), so everyone's happy. The patent system is a good system for keeping newly-developed knowledge accessible.
However, as many other people have pointed out, the problem with the current system is that it doesn't require invention, it requires ideas. And the patent office really has no incentive to take a good look at the ideas to see if they qualify for non-obviousness. People no longer patent things so that other people won't copy them, they patent ideas so that other people cannot invent them independantly.
Yay for legal definitions. However I, and most other people, don't let our morality be decided by a court of law. Your definition is totally arbitrary - there is no proof in there that a developing foetus does not have an independant consciousness, which is what I would consider the definition of an individual. Dependancy on another does not make a foetus part of that other - even after birth the newborn is highly dependant on its parents for nourishment and shelter.
Why is it some kind of a pro-open source argument to say that Firefox is on par with a program developed by an "evil corporation"?
It's not a pro-open source argument. It's a rebuttal of an arguemnt often put forward by anti-open source people, that is, that something free, and written in an uncontrolled environment can never be as good as something that costs money and was written by engineers under the control of central management.
In the end, given enough time, both groups of programmers have equivalent education and experience and, given the right environment, will design similarly competent (or incompetent) code.
The key in that sentance is "given the right environment". Who do you think will do better work? A programmer who is under obligation to program the way someone else thinks it should be done, with little to no say in the overall direction of a product, or a programmer who is doing what he is doing as a labour of love?
That said, I think there's a definite place in the world for corporate development. I just don't think there's much of a place for closed source development. In my ideal world, Open Source would tend to float to the top for aspects of projects that programmers consider "interesting", which seems to me to be the guts of projects. The engines, the APIs, etc. Corporate development could then build on Open Source engines with things that programmers often find boring - like UI design, documentation, etc.
My job as the Bible mandates is to enforce responsibility in my brothers and sisters in Christ, and be a model for non-believers. I can not control a non-believer and using Caesar to do so is wrong.
This is what frustrates me more and more about these sort of groups. The great commission Christ gave to the church is "Go, make disciples of all nations", not "Go, tell off all the nations for swearing and screwing around".
The authority of the church is, and should be, limited to governing Christians. When churches get into politics, it isn't pretty. If you want to change the behaviour of the nation, then start converting the nation. And a free tip: haranguing the nation about their sin isn't likely to work too well.
The sole exception I can think of is things like abortion, where the actions in question have a direct effect upon a third party (the foetus), although in that particular debate the question is more wether the third party is really a "party" or not, rather than the morality of the action itself.
I presume that, on your honor, you immediately buy every video that you downloaded in advance when it is eventually released?
Apart from those that I downloaded, viewed, and didn't like (in which case they're no longer on my harddrive), then yes. It probably helps that I'm fairly picky about what I watch and only like a few series.
The quality is not particularly different (a random error every twenty videos means squat). And I am willing to wager that a significant fraction, probably the majority, of downloading is of videos already released overseas.
The quality is significantly different. As you say, mistakes in subtitling aren't very significant (although I'd expect something I'm paying $30-35 for to be better than something people do for free), but stuff like anti-aliased fonts look much better than DVD subtitles, and I like having the romanized Japanese lyrics to opening and closing sequences. The cultural notes some groups make are also useful at times.
I also doubt that most downloading is of already-licensed anime. In anime circles, the same as with much else, the most popular items are the newest. The things that get the most downloads are the new things. In general, the new series are not already licensed (there are exceptions; I believe GitS:SAC was licensed in the US before it screened in Japan). Anime fans will generally download the new series and watch them before they get licensed in the US. At the moment only one of my three favourite anime series is available for sale in Australia and I own the boxset. I downloaded the series as they were being released, once every couple of weeks. I'm not exactly sure but it was at least a year after this that they were for sale in Australia. That's plenty of time for anime fans to download it, watch it, and move on before it gets licensed. (Saishuu Heiki Kanojo, the other two being Hikaru no Go and Planetes, although I believe Planetes is licensed, but not yet available for sale.)
More than half of the hardcore anime fans that I know are substantial pirates, however. They buy almost none but download tons. Fan-subbing has eliminated nearly half of the market by my estimation.
I wouldn't say fansubbing has eliminated nearly half the market. Rather, it has prevented the market from growing. That's the price of being slow on the uptake, same as the music industry is finding with online music. People wanted anime long before legitimate suppliers bothered supplying it. A black market developed to serve the need. Now the industry has wised up, but the black market is too entrenched.
Also, you may want to check out your friends anime collections: check out how much of their anime was available to purchase when they downloaded it. I get most of my anime from torrents listed on animesuki.com. It only lists series that have not yet been licensed in the US. Even when they have been licensed, it takes a good whack of time for them to be available to purchase. And then it takes them longer to get to my country (Australia).
I will now eagerly await this post to get modded down like all my others in this thread. May I recommend "Underrated"? Variety is the spice of life, and you've already used "Troll" and "Flamebait".
The leadership required to build that kind of enterprise requires charisma.
For building it, maybe, but there are an awful lot of large businesses that weren't built in a single lifetime. After the brilliant visionary establishes it, it is either passed down, or passed off. And there is no guarantee the new leader will be as exceptional as the visionary. Establishment is hard. Taking an existing, successful business and expanding it is hard. Simply keeping the gears grinding away is not hard.
That said, I've never watched The Apprentice, nor have any desire to.
Quit complaining and pay for your goodies. By the time you have watched all the legally-available anime released in the US, your Japanese will be good enough that you don't need the subtitles anymore and you can just buy new stuff direct from Japan.
Did you read my post? I do pay for my anime. I have purchased every anime series, that I am interested in, that has been released in my country (Australia, not the US). Why would I want to buy all legally-available anime? I'm not interested in all anime. I am interested in that subset of anime that I enjoy, and it most definately is not all of it; not even the majority of it.
Btw, I do speak fair Japanese, and have rarely encountered problems with the official translations. Those that do appear are related to the vast differences in the language, not the translation itself. I can't comment on fan-subs because I do not watch them.
As I said, I don't know Japanese, so I can't comment on the literal translation. However, the english used in subtitles on some discs seems to have been skipped over by the QA department. There are misspellings, grammatical errors and clumsy sentance construction. I noticed an error on the last disc I bought (Scrapped Princess vol. 2), but I'd have to re-watch it again to find the exact details.
Regardless of that, I wasn't trying to justify downloading fansubs. You asked what legitimate reason people had for using illegal fansubs as opposed to legitimate copies. I gave you reasons: Speed, and quality. Your question wasn't "why are people justified in downloading fansubs" it was "why do people download fansubs". My answer was the right one. You just misrepresented your question.
Unless this kid has been watching sado-masochist master-slave bondage hardcore, he hasnt seen anyone degraded
Because there are degrees of domination, and only the most extreme gets labelled S&M? There's plenty of porn around that doesn't show a woman as an equal partner in a sexual experience, but as someone there solely to pleasure men. Not all porn, but a not-insignificant proportion of it shows women this way. That's not at all unexpected, since porn's target market is male. There's no real incentive for porn to show a true and accurate depiction of sex, when a large segment of their target market wants fantasy, and the rest of it doesn't care.
Slashdot Mirror
Or under your armpit even
As I said at the end of my post: With our current level of technical skill and technology, there are very few inventions that could not be reverse engineered. Thus there are very few inventions that give the public a good deal on patents.
Kazaa is centralized; all Kazaa queries go through the Kazaa network. So no, the original inventors of the FTP protocol aren't going to be busted - unless they coincidentally happen to be running an illegal warez FTP.
That's what's happening with Sharman. They're not being busted for creating a client that other people use illegally, they're being told to implement blocks on certain traffic that passes through their network. They didn't do the blocks, so instead they pulled access from Australia in order to comply.
And yet there seems to be an awful lot of Open Source code around written by people who work full-time. And I know plenty of people who work in "crappy service jobs", for closer to 40 hours a week, and earn decent money. There's no need to slave away for 12 hours a day.
Nowadays, companies hire scientists for the sole purpose of producing patents. In days gone buy, they hired them for the sole purpose of producing products. Patents have been around for yonks, true, but the current patent-frenzy and huge patent portfolio's have not been, and the system was working fine back then.
There's two problems I can find with this:
The solution to these is to drastically tighten the current guidelines for obviousness in the patent office. The trick is going to be finding a way to systemetize the analysis of deliberately obfuscated patent claims cost-effectively, and then convincing the government that the long-term benefits to science from a working patent system is more beneficial than money in the patent offices' bank account now, and happy corporations sponsoring them in the next election.
As I posted on another thread, the patent system was not designed to spur people into inventing. Patents or not, people will always be inventing. The patent system was designed to ensure that the way new inventions work will be available, in the future, for other people to build on.
Say I manage to invent some uber-efficient new power cell. Nobody knows how it works, and because my invention is a non-obvious, opening it up and attempting to reverse engineer it is very difficult.
Without a patent system, I sell these power cells and make lots of money. Then a die, and nobody knows how I did it, and the invention is lost. With a patent system, I sell these power cells and make lots of money for a limited time. During that time, I am secure in the knowledge that even if someone else figures out how I did it, I have an exclusive right to that idea. At the end of the period, my exclusive right is revoked, and everyone can now build new inventions on top of my existing power cell (assuming they didn't licence it off me beforehand).
That is how the patent system is supposed to work. It's sort of like a way of mandating open-source for inventions - we'll give you a guaranteed, limited-time monopoly in exchange for telling us how you did it.
The system falls down when non-obvious ideas are patented. In this case, the "schematics for monopoly" deal is a bad deal - society is not interested in the schematics for an obvious invention because, well, it's obvious. But lately patent offices have been making many, many bad deals on behalf of the public, handing out government-sponsored monopolies like they were candy.
I've digressed a little from what I started writing about, so let me just say it again. The patent system is not designed to somehow encourage invention. Inventors will always invent. The patent system is designed to encourage inventors to divulge internal workings that could not be easily inferred from looking at the invention by someone skilled in that area. With our current level of technical skill and technology, there are very few inventions that could not be reverse engineered. Thus there are very few inventions that give the public a good deal on patents.
Yep, we should all teach kids at a young age to expect trash from companies, to never have any expectation that when they buy something, it works, and that when they've been dumped on, they should suck it up like a good little consumer.
Seriously, I'm as sick of whiny brats as anyone else. And I think there are more of them around now then there used to be. But getting upset when something you've been long-expecting fails to deliver isn't whining. It's natural, and when children are upset, it's only natural that they cry.
Haven't heard about the lawnmower one, but the Winnebago one is an urban legend according to Snopes.
I don't know about US law, but under Australian law, manufacturers are not responsible for the inappropriate use of their products. All products carry with them an implied warranty of fitness for merchantability and a particular purpose. That is, if you knowingly sell a product that does not perform in the manner in which it is expected to perform*, you are in trouble.
*"the manner in which it is expected to perform" is a bit vague. It is generally understood that the purpose of most products is generally understood - if the company claims the use to which the customer put the product was not one in which it was expected to perform, then it is up to the courts to decide whether or not that is a reasonable claim.
I'm guessing the government wouldn't administer the WiFi themselves - there's probably a very happy telco out there somewhere looking to get a very fat contract. So while Bell South might be miffed, there's someone else who will be very happy. Of course, having a state-sponsored telco is a mite bad to free marketeers, but then, when was the last time telecommunications operated as a free market?
Not only awesome, but therepeutic.
When I was a kid, I had chickenpox. My case was an especially severe one, and I was bedridden for a while with high fevers, which we kept down through medication. I just lay in bed in my hypercolour shirt, and when it started to change colour (due to the fever beginning to rise), Mum could tell the meds had worn off and I needed another dose. Better than mucking around with thermometers every half hour or so.
This isn't a reality TV show; it's a documentary. Documentaries have been around for ages, and they aren't designed to entertain in the way films are, they're designed to inform. Geeks probably aren't the target audience for this - we already know most of the stuff they're going to be showing. The target audience are people who don't know the first thing about what goes on when developing software, so that once they've finished watching it, they will have a clue.
Asimov wrote a story about that. I think it was called True Love, found in The Complete Robot.
Based on Asimov's story, I'd be careful. If I remember correctly, in his story, the AI ended up with the chick.
Confidentiality agreements are common practice in these sort of arrangements. If there were no CA, then this guy doesn't have a leg to stand on. As soon as I read the story summary, I assumed there was a CA being violated. If EA did sign a CA, and that CA covered the idea he presented, and the idea EA eventually developed came from him and was not demonstrably developed beforehand, then he has a chance of winning. Given he has enough money to field enough lawyers for enough time, of course.
I quite agree with you that people will always invent/compose/code, regardless of patents being present or not. They have for thousands of years prior to patent legislation. And I think the people who came up with the patent system knew that as well. The patent system is not designed to give people an incentive to invent. It's designed to give people an incentive to distribute the way they accomplished their invention. That's why there are provisions about non-obvious inventions - experts in their field can tell how obvious inventions work without the need for a patent, so the trade of "protection for schematics" is a bad deal in those cases.
The patent system is designed to combat the system of "trade secrets" that was quite prevelant before this. I was researching sword-making some time back, and I found something very interesting. Nobody knows how European swords were made any more. At best, they can offer educated guesses. Until recently, nobody could figure out how Damascus steel was forged, and even what they have now is only a likely possibility. You see, sword making was considered a secret art, handed down by one smith to his apprentice, and jealously guarded. When one line of smiths died out, so did all the knowledge they guarded. With every death, knowledge was being lost because people were too scared to share it.
The patent system tries to give people and insurance policy on their inventions Tell us how you did it, and we'll make sure nobody will rip off your invention for the next X years. The public gets the knowledge of how it was done (eventually), the inventor gets a guarantee of exclusivity (which he would not normally have gotten, even if he kept his invention secret - other people could reverse engineer it), so everyone's happy. The patent system is a good system for keeping newly-developed knowledge accessible.
However, as many other people have pointed out, the problem with the current system is that it doesn't require invention, it requires ideas. And the patent office really has no incentive to take a good look at the ideas to see if they qualify for non-obviousness. People no longer patent things so that other people won't copy them, they patent ideas so that other people cannot invent them independantly.
Yay for legal definitions. However I, and most other people, don't let our morality be decided by a court of law. Your definition is totally arbitrary - there is no proof in there that a developing foetus does not have an independant consciousness, which is what I would consider the definition of an individual. Dependancy on another does not make a foetus part of that other - even after birth the newborn is highly dependant on its parents for nourishment and shelter.
Why is it some kind of a pro-open source argument to say that Firefox is on par with a program developed by an "evil corporation"?
It's not a pro-open source argument. It's a rebuttal of an arguemnt often put forward by anti-open source people, that is, that something free, and written in an uncontrolled environment can never be as good as something that costs money and was written by engineers under the control of central management.
In the end, given enough time, both groups of programmers have equivalent education and experience and, given the right environment, will design similarly competent (or incompetent) code.
The key in that sentance is "given the right environment". Who do you think will do better work? A programmer who is under obligation to program the way someone else thinks it should be done, with little to no say in the overall direction of a product, or a programmer who is doing what he is doing as a labour of love?
That said, I think there's a definite place in the world for corporate development. I just don't think there's much of a place for closed source development. In my ideal world, Open Source would tend to float to the top for aspects of projects that programmers consider "interesting", which seems to me to be the guts of projects. The engines, the APIs, etc. Corporate development could then build on Open Source engines with things that programmers often find boring - like UI design, documentation, etc.
My job as the Bible mandates is to enforce responsibility in my brothers and sisters in Christ, and be a model for non-believers. I can not control a non-believer and using Caesar to do so is wrong.
This is what frustrates me more and more about these sort of groups. The great commission Christ gave to the church is "Go, make disciples of all nations", not "Go, tell off all the nations for swearing and screwing around".
The authority of the church is, and should be, limited to governing Christians. When churches get into politics, it isn't pretty. If you want to change the behaviour of the nation, then start converting the nation. And a free tip: haranguing the nation about their sin isn't likely to work too well.
The sole exception I can think of is things like abortion, where the actions in question have a direct effect upon a third party (the foetus), although in that particular debate the question is more wether the third party is really a "party" or not, rather than the morality of the action itself.
Because boys are different to girls?
(There are some websites around that will allow you to verify this visually, I've heard)
I presume that, on your honor, you immediately buy every video that you downloaded in advance when it is eventually released?
Apart from those that I downloaded, viewed, and didn't like (in which case they're no longer on my harddrive), then yes. It probably helps that I'm fairly picky about what I watch and only like a few series.
The quality is not particularly different (a random error every twenty videos means squat). And I am willing to wager that a significant fraction, probably the majority, of downloading is of videos already released overseas.
The quality is significantly different. As you say, mistakes in subtitling aren't very significant (although I'd expect something I'm paying $30-35 for to be better than something people do for free), but stuff like anti-aliased fonts look much better than DVD subtitles, and I like having the romanized Japanese lyrics to opening and closing sequences. The cultural notes some groups make are also useful at times.
I also doubt that most downloading is of already-licensed anime. In anime circles, the same as with much else, the most popular items are the newest. The things that get the most downloads are the new things. In general, the new series are not already licensed (there are exceptions; I believe GitS:SAC was licensed in the US before it screened in Japan). Anime fans will generally download the new series and watch them before they get licensed in the US. At the moment only one of my three favourite anime series is available for sale in Australia and I own the boxset. I downloaded the series as they were being released, once every couple of weeks. I'm not exactly sure but it was at least a year after this that they were for sale in Australia. That's plenty of time for anime fans to download it, watch it, and move on before it gets licensed. (Saishuu Heiki Kanojo, the other two being Hikaru no Go and Planetes, although I believe Planetes is licensed, but not yet available for sale.)
No, that would only stop poor idiots. You've still got rich idiots to contend with.
More than half of the hardcore anime fans that I know are substantial pirates, however. They buy almost none but download tons. Fan-subbing has eliminated nearly half of the market by my estimation.
I wouldn't say fansubbing has eliminated nearly half the market. Rather, it has prevented the market from growing. That's the price of being slow on the uptake, same as the music industry is finding with online music. People wanted anime long before legitimate suppliers bothered supplying it. A black market developed to serve the need. Now the industry has wised up, but the black market is too entrenched.
Also, you may want to check out your friends anime collections: check out how much of their anime was available to purchase when they downloaded it. I get most of my anime from torrents listed on animesuki.com. It only lists series that have not yet been licensed in the US. Even when they have been licensed, it takes a good whack of time for them to be available to purchase. And then it takes them longer to get to my country (Australia).
I will now eagerly await this post to get modded down like all my others in this thread. May I recommend "Underrated"? Variety is the spice of life, and you've already used "Troll" and "Flamebait".
The leadership required to build that kind of enterprise requires charisma.
For building it, maybe, but there are an awful lot of large businesses that weren't built in a single lifetime. After the brilliant visionary establishes it, it is either passed down, or passed off. And there is no guarantee the new leader will be as exceptional as the visionary. Establishment is hard. Taking an existing, successful business and expanding it is hard. Simply keeping the gears grinding away is not hard.
That said, I've never watched The Apprentice, nor have any desire to.
Quit complaining and pay for your goodies. By the time you have watched all the legally-available anime released in the US, your Japanese will be good enough that you don't need the subtitles anymore and you can just buy new stuff direct from Japan.
Did you read my post? I do pay for my anime. I have purchased every anime series, that I am interested in, that has been released in my country (Australia, not the US). Why would I want to buy all legally-available anime? I'm not interested in all anime. I am interested in that subset of anime that I enjoy, and it most definately is not all of it; not even the majority of it.
Btw, I do speak fair Japanese, and have rarely encountered problems with the official translations. Those that do appear are related to the vast differences in the language, not the translation itself. I can't comment on fan-subs because I do not watch them.
As I said, I don't know Japanese, so I can't comment on the literal translation. However, the english used in subtitles on some discs seems to have been skipped over by the QA department. There are misspellings, grammatical errors and clumsy sentance construction. I noticed an error on the last disc I bought (Scrapped Princess vol. 2), but I'd have to re-watch it again to find the exact details.
Regardless of that, I wasn't trying to justify downloading fansubs. You asked what legitimate reason people had for using illegal fansubs as opposed to legitimate copies. I gave you reasons: Speed, and quality. Your question wasn't "why are people justified in downloading fansubs" it was "why do people download fansubs". My answer was the right one. You just misrepresented your question.
Unless this kid has been watching sado-masochist master-slave bondage hardcore, he hasnt seen anyone degraded
Because there are degrees of domination, and only the most extreme gets labelled S&M? There's plenty of porn around that doesn't show a woman as an equal partner in a sexual experience, but as someone there solely to pleasure men. Not all porn, but a not-insignificant proportion of it shows women this way. That's not at all unexpected, since porn's target market is male. There's no real incentive for porn to show a true and accurate depiction of sex, when a large segment of their target market wants fantasy, and the rest of it doesn't care.