not to mention TPB is funded by a fascist supporter of an extremist right wing party in Sweden. You trust that guy to keep your data and privacy safe? If so, you get what you deserve.
I've broken the law before, I'm guilty of breaking and entering and trespass. I did so as part of an organised public protest.
When the police stopped us, they asked for our names and addresses, which we happily provided. We broke the law knowing the consequences, hoping that we could draw press attention to what we believed was unjust. We believed in the cause enough that we were happy to suffer the consequences, and would be happy to argue our case in court, although as it goes, we were not charged.
That's what people who protest to achieve real change do. People who break and enter, then fuck off before the cops come are not protesters, they are just vandals and thugs.
Torrenting movies anonymously is not public protest. If it was you would want to get caught. Getting caught is how you drag the issue into the spotlight and fight for change. Anyone using a VPN to torrent Hollywood movies isn't fighting the system, they are just tight-asses and leeches.
when its offered by a site called 'thepiratebay' the worlds biggest torrent tracker whose top 100 downloaded files are all torrents of copyrighted material... well lets just say the odds are pretty much in favour of it being used that way.
Why does everyone here cling to some slim flimsy belief that what thepiratebay does is anything other than wilful, cynical wholesale copyright infringement?
Why not start your own company? in this day and age the assumption that you need to get a job offer from someone else is strange. Nobody cares how old you are when you run a company. I'm 39 and a programmer. No biggie.
I can't tell much difference between ogg and wav when it comes to stuff like bullet sounds or footsteps. Can you? Mp3 is a bit tinny, but ogg sounds perfect to me. And a LOT of artwork in games can get away with compression. When artists have to zoom in to maximum zoom and look at two image side by side, you know you are just wasting bandwidth.
I couldn't agree more. With the exception of us indie devs, the ability to put together games in small file sizes has become a lost art. People actually ship demos with wavs rather than oggs, and bmps when jpgs would do. Identical geometry and textures get released in a single installation, and textures are often larger than they will ever appear onscreen. The worst sin is devs which release demos containing tons of art and sound assets that can never be used in the demo level. This still goes on, because nobody is ever at any stage given an incentive to keep the filesize down. I pay per gigabyte when people download my demos, and I keep them as small as I can.
I've always hated intermediary sites that exist purely because developers and publishers wanted to save a few pennies on file hosting. If, as a gem developer I want you to try my demos, watch my videos and look at my screenshots, I'll host them myself. That way I have 100% uptime, I know tjhey are easy to find, there are no ads or registration screens or other fuss to get between my customers and my product, and both me and my customers are happy.
I know that letting filefront host stuff would save me bandwidth, but these days bandwidth is cheap, and I work hard to keep demo file-sizes down. the idea of a 1 gig demo for a game is laughable.
Plus, demos and trailers are MARKETING. Of course I want to get this stuff direct to gamers as easily and hassle-free as possible. I'm sure some big companies who are incapable of making games under 3 gigs will mourn the loss, but I can't say I'm one of them. Direct hosting FTW.
this already exists. I use the DMCA, and every time I send one, I have to state, under penalty of perjury that the information I have supplied is accurate. Not surprisingly, I am flipping careful to make sure I only send out entirely legit complaints.
People making false DMCA requests are simply idiots, and no amount of careful phrasing of law will weed idiots out of the system.
you don't. Nor do I, or anyone who doesn't spend their life whining that everything should be free. Why do people give fundamentalists like stallman the oxygen of publicity? I bet the clothes he's wearing and the lentils he ate today arent free. What's so magic about software?
Agreed. But you said the magic words "the band and a few others". These 'few others' would be the guys who handle promoting and marketing the band, handling the money, the bookings etc. I know a bit about this, having been a musician in a previous life. Most musicians are crap business people, so they are better off getting someone else (a manager, amateur or pro) to handle this stuff. The thing is, to actually do well enough to live off, complete with a decent pension etc, your musicians need to sell a ton of music, and play a lot of gigs. The mate who helps out won't cut it as the biz guy, they need professional representation.
Amazingly, not every magazine, newspaper, or even website will write about your band unless you know someone who has contacts there and can get people to return their calls. There are organisations of these people, who are professionals at promoting and helping bands to grow, and we call them record companies. YES, a lot of them are scum. I've dealt with record companies myself and have no love for them, but they ARE generally beneficial to a band. There are a few exceptions, where a band can handle its own amrketing very well, but these are rare. Few musicians (or games developers for that matter) enjoy looking at spreadsheets and advertising media kits.
I know it's hip to slag off record companies, publishers, and middle men of all kids, but the fact remains most of them exist with good reason. In this day and age, there is nothing to stop all kinds of direct to consumer businesses from working, but most of us still use middlemen, from record companies, to activision to wal-mart. In the vast majority of cases, the middlemen provide a service that adds value. Nobody forces musicians to sign those contracts. They weigh it up pretty heavily beforehand.
it was before the dotcom boom, but certainly better economic times than now. I take the point that it is harder now. But recessions arent likely to go on forever, and a career change is a long term thing. The point is, it can be done. it's extremely hard, but that's a totally different situation to "nobody ever manages this".
On the other hand, I KNOW it can be done. I made a quite insane journey from traditional wooden boatbuilding to computer programmer. It took me a long time, because I got distracted by actually working in IT support (at quite a decent paid level, 3rd line network support), but it could have been done quicker. I had no degree (a failed attempt at economics), not a single qualification in computing, and a work history as a guitar teacher and a boatbuilder, and yet I managed to shift into IT, and then into coding. This is how I did it:
1) I went to evening classes and got some C and C++ exams under my belt. 2) I coded some ganmes from scratch and started selling them, giving me something visually impressive on my CV 3) I didn't hide my previous jobs. In fact, I think they helped my CV to stand out 4) I acted confident about getting every job I went to. Being an ex-musician helped in this. No interview for a job is as scary as playing a gig to a bunch of drunk Hells Angels on a saturday night.
When I was a boatbuilder, the most hi-tech equipment we had was a telephone. We didn't even have electric screwdrivers, or for that matter, plumbing. The floor was sawdust on concrete. If I can go from that environment to lead programmer, then anyone can do it. That doesn't mean it isn't extremely fucking hard to do so, but I can assure you it is doable.
how is killing off all incentive to create new entertainment 'progress'? what total fucking bullshit. People will parrot any old crap if it makes them feel better about stealing music and movies. it's truly kinda sad.
what freedom is this? freedom to take something somebody else spent a decade making, and ditribute it for free before they do? In what fucked up world is this a freedom we should feel entitled to? What about a musicians freedom to control the exloitation of their work? I have zero sympathy for the kid. He knew what he was doing.
Lets say I'm an immigrant worker. I can do your job perfectly as well as you can, but I can do it for free. Absolutely for free. And nobody can tell the difference between my work and yours. I'm applying for your job this afternoon. Every other job in the same field is also being applied for by similar people. It's taken you your whole life to train to do this. How are you paying your grocery bill next month?
and yet with physical property, ownership is infinite. And people grow up knowing they will inherit daddys fortune and thus slack their way through life.
Nobody ever complains about THAT, because they hope to inherit from mommy and daddy too. The reason people whine at intellectual property, whilst defending furiously physical property and land ownership is purely self interest, and a cynical attempt to cling on to what's coming to them, whilst getting other peoples work for free.
well said, although I not with tedious predictability that someone who hates having to pay for stuff, and can't argue their case has modded you down anyway. It can be sad watching the warez kids defend their ludicrous position.
Can we do the same with 'property' please? Because the idea that you own an area of land because you have a piece of paper you inherited from 6 generations back is kinda silly, and is just propaganda. Native Americans had no concept of land ownership. The idea is a recent corporate monopoly and should be overturned...
wow. So ever piece of content you have ever enjoyed was only made by people who did it purely for the love?
Did that include the set designers on the movies? The sound engineer? The catering staff for the location shots? the mail room guys? the continuity girl?
Really?
You must spend ages vetting movies before selecting what you find entertaining. Personally, I don't give a fuck if the guys making movies I love are cynical money-grabbing scum. As long as I find pleasure from watching their movies, why would I give a damn? You don't care if your cheese sandwich was a labour of money or love, so why is it magically true of a TV drama?
Slashdot Mirror
not to mention TPB is funded by a fascist supporter of an extremist right wing party in Sweden.
You trust that guy to keep your data and privacy safe?
If so, you get what you deserve.
I've broken the law before, I'm guilty of breaking and entering and trespass. I did so as part of an organised public protest.
When the police stopped us, they asked for our names and addresses, which we happily provided.
We broke the law knowing the consequences, hoping that we could draw press attention to what we believed was unjust. We believed in the cause enough that we were happy to suffer the consequences, and would be happy to argue our case in court, although as it goes, we were not charged.
That's what people who protest to achieve real change do. People who break and enter, then fuck off before the cops come are not protesters, they are just vandals and thugs.
Torrenting movies anonymously is not public protest. If it was you would want to get caught. Getting caught is how you drag the issue into the spotlight and fight for change. Anyone using a VPN to torrent Hollywood movies isn't fighting the system, they are just tight-asses and leeches.
when its offered by a site called 'thepiratebay' the worlds biggest torrent tracker whose top 100 downloaded files are all torrents of copyrighted material...
well lets just say the odds are pretty much in favour of it being used that way.
Why does everyone here cling to some slim flimsy belief that what thepiratebay does is anything other than wilful, cynical wholesale copyright infringement?
Why not start your own company? in this day and age the assumption that you need to get a job offer from someone else is strange.
Nobody cares how old you are when you run a company. I'm 39 and a programmer. No biggie.
I can't tell much difference between ogg and wav when it comes to stuff like bullet sounds or footsteps. Can you? Mp3 is a bit tinny, but ogg sounds perfect to me.
And a LOT of artwork in games can get away with compression. When artists have to zoom in to maximum zoom and look at two image side by side, you know you are just wasting bandwidth.
I couldn't agree more. With the exception of us indie devs, the ability to put together games in small file sizes has become a lost art. People actually ship demos with wavs rather than oggs, and bmps when jpgs would do. Identical geometry and textures get released in a single installation, and textures are often larger than they will ever appear onscreen.
The worst sin is devs which release demos containing tons of art and sound assets that can never be used in the demo level. This still goes on, because nobody is ever at any stage given an incentive to keep the filesize down.
I pay per gigabyte when people download my demos, and I keep them as small as I can.
I've always hated intermediary sites that exist purely because developers and publishers wanted to save a few pennies on file hosting.
If, as a gem developer I want you to try my demos, watch my videos and look at my screenshots, I'll host them myself. That way I have 100% uptime, I know tjhey are easy to find, there are no ads or registration screens or other fuss to get between my customers and my product, and both me and my customers are happy.
I know that letting filefront host stuff would save me bandwidth, but these days bandwidth is cheap, and I work hard to keep demo file-sizes down. the idea of a 1 gig demo for a game is laughable.
Plus, demos and trailers are MARKETING. Of course I want to get this stuff direct to gamers as easily and hassle-free as possible.
I'm sure some big companies who are incapable of making games under 3 gigs will mourn the loss, but I can't say I'm one of them. Direct hosting FTW.
this already exists. I use the DMCA, and every time I send one, I have to state, under penalty of perjury that the information I have supplied is accurate.
Not surprisingly, I am flipping careful to make sure I only send out entirely legit complaints.
People making false DMCA requests are simply idiots, and no amount of careful phrasing of law will weed idiots out of the system.
you don't. Nor do I, or anyone who doesn't spend their life whining that everything should be free.
Why do people give fundamentalists like stallman the oxygen of publicity?
I bet the clothes he's wearing and the lentils he ate today arent free. What's so magic about software?
Agreed. But you said the magic words "the band and a few others". These 'few others' would be the guys who handle promoting and marketing the band, handling the money, the bookings etc.
I know a bit about this, having been a musician in a previous life. Most musicians are crap business people, so they are better off getting someone else (a manager, amateur or pro) to handle this stuff.
The thing is, to actually do well enough to live off, complete with a decent pension etc, your musicians need to sell a ton of music, and play a lot of gigs. The mate who helps out won't cut it as the biz guy, they need professional representation.
Amazingly, not every magazine, newspaper, or even website will write about your band unless you know someone who has contacts there and can get people to return their calls. There are organisations of these people, who are professionals at promoting and helping bands to grow, and we call them record companies.
YES, a lot of them are scum. I've dealt with record companies myself and have no love for them, but they ARE generally beneficial to a band. There are a few exceptions, where a band can handle its own amrketing very well, but these are rare. Few musicians (or games developers for that matter) enjoy looking at spreadsheets and advertising media kits.
I know it's hip to slag off record companies, publishers, and middle men of all kids, but the fact remains most of them exist with good reason. In this day and age, there is nothing to stop all kinds of direct to consumer businesses from working, but most of us still use middlemen, from record companies, to activision to wal-mart. In the vast majority of cases, the middlemen provide a service that adds value.
Nobody forces musicians to sign those contracts. They weigh it up pretty heavily beforehand.
so completely ignoring copyright and IP will help the worlds biggest creator of digital content how exactly?
so healthcare and illegal wars in iraq didn't do it, but defending kids rights to take movies and music for free will do it.
yeah right.
it was before the dotcom boom, but certainly better economic times than now. I take the point that it is harder now. But recessions arent likely to go on forever, and a career change is a long term thing. The point is, it can be done. it's extremely hard, but that's a totally different situation to "nobody ever manages this".
On the other hand, I KNOW it can be done. I made a quite insane journey from traditional wooden boatbuilding to computer programmer. It took me a long time, because I got distracted by actually working in IT support (at quite a decent paid level, 3rd line network support), but it could have been done quicker.
I had no degree (a failed attempt at economics), not a single qualification in computing, and a work history as a guitar teacher and a boatbuilder, and yet I managed to shift into IT, and then into coding. This is how I did it:
1) I went to evening classes and got some C and C++ exams under my belt.
2) I coded some ganmes from scratch and started selling them, giving me something visually impressive on my CV
3) I didn't hide my previous jobs. In fact, I think they helped my CV to stand out
4) I acted confident about getting every job I went to. Being an ex-musician helped in this. No interview for a job is as scary as playing a gig to a bunch of drunk Hells Angels on a saturday night.
When I was a boatbuilder, the most hi-tech equipment we had was a telephone. We didn't even have electric screwdrivers, or for that matter, plumbing. The floor was sawdust on concrete. If I can go from that environment to lead programmer, then anyone can do it. That doesn't mean it isn't extremely fucking hard to do so, but I can assure you it is doable.
ever tried paying the rent with art?
idiot
how is killing off all incentive to create new entertainment 'progress'?
what total fucking bullshit.
People will parrot any old crap if it makes them feel better about stealing music and movies. it's truly kinda sad.
agreed 100%. But here on slashdot, thieves are heroes and anyone creative or successful is the enenmy.
Pathetic isn't it.
what freedom is this?
freedom to take something somebody else spent a decade making, and ditribute it for free before they do?
In what fucked up world is this a freedom we should feel entitled to?
What about a musicians freedom to control the exloitation of their work?
I have zero sympathy for the kid. He knew what he was doing.
so fucking what?
The record company wasted time and money, not you?
Are you a record company shareholder?
No?
Then quit whining.
North Korea called. They want their philosophy back.
Lets say I'm an immigrant worker. I can do your job perfectly as well as you can, but I can do it for free.
Absolutely for free.
And nobody can tell the difference between my work and yours.
I'm applying for your job this afternoon. Every other job in the same field is also being applied for by similar people. It's taken you your whole life to train to do this.
How are you paying your grocery bill next month?
and yet with physical property, ownership is infinite.
And people grow up knowing they will inherit daddys fortune and thus slack their way through life.
Nobody ever complains about THAT, because they hope to inherit from mommy and daddy too. The reason people whine at intellectual property, whilst defending furiously physical property and land ownership is purely self interest, and a cynical attempt to cling on to what's coming to them, whilst getting other peoples work for free.
well said, although I not with tedious predictability that someone who hates having to pay for stuff, and can't argue their case has modded you down anyway.
It can be sad watching the warez kids defend their ludicrous position.
LOL.
what drivel.
Can we do the same with 'property' please?
Because the idea that you own an area of land because you have a piece of paper you inherited from 6 generations back is kinda silly, and is just propaganda.
Native Americans had no concept of land ownership. The idea is a recent corporate monopoly and should be overturned...
wow.
So ever piece of content you have ever enjoyed was only made by people who did it purely for the love?
Did that include the set designers on the movies? The sound engineer? The catering staff for the location shots? the mail room guys? the continuity girl?
Really?
You must spend ages vetting movies before selecting what you find entertaining.
Personally, I don't give a fuck if the guys making movies I love are cynical money-grabbing scum. As long as I find pleasure from watching their movies, why would I give a damn?
You don't care if your cheese sandwich was a labour of money or love, so why is it magically true of a TV drama?