"You're doing something that doesn't harm anyone in any way"
Let me guess, you don't rely on selling games for a living do you?
You are talking shit. long winded shit to justify stealing games, just don't embarrass yourself by this rationalizing to people who actually lose sales to piracy...
If I make a game, and you want to play it, and you refuse to pay me for my work, you are a thief. you can type pages of bullshit to try and weasel out of it, I'll always call a thief a thief, a leech a leech and a scumbag with a sense of entitlement a scumbag with a sense of entitlement.
if you bought someone elses game, their game was better, and the free market is working fine. If you actually preferred his game, yet you decided to take it and not pay for it, you just blew that free market to bits. He thinks nobody likes his game, makes no sequel, and maybe goes out of business. Markets rely on signals, ideally in the form of money going from satisfied consumers to efficient producers. If you can't see how subverting the whole signaling process isn't the same as buying from a competitor... then I don't know how else to explain it.
Understand that when content producers say they are deprived of revenue they are being SPECIFIC. They mean that someone who knew of the product and WANTED the product, did not pay for it. Nobody expects to get revenue for something that the customer didn't want, and this is NOT the issue. It only ever comes up when people desperately try to talk themselves into thinking pirating stuff is harmless. It isn't.
If you make a product, you evaluate how many people are likely to be in the target market, and put up huge up-front costs to create a product that will make a profit if a reasonable proportion of the target market that wants it, buys it. If you download (steal/copy whatever the fuck makes you sleep at night) the game, then clearly you were in the target market and wanted it. But you just shrunk that potential target market by 1.
Now lets assume that everyone acts like you. whats the new target market size?
0
Whats the amount of new products it makes sense to fund?
0
Well done. you just killed off gaming, unless of course, you assume that 99% of people are honest, and you can leech off the products that they pay o have created. So maybe you aren't a thief, or a pirate, just a freeloading leech. Happy?
I make games for a living. I know every days, dozens if not hundreds of potential customers who would otherwise help me stay in business just steal the games from the web. They like the games, they want them, they just think its beneath them to pay the guy who made them. How motivated do you think this makes me to keep making PC games? as opposed to business software? There is a good reason so few developers give a fuck about the PC platform these days.
is that so mad? I remembe catching a train out of london that day, and being a bit nervous about the whole 'being in a packed capital city that jet airliners fly over every minute' until I got home (out of London)
It's easy to forget the uncertainty of that day. The first plane was an accident, the second and some heavy shit was going down. By the time I saw footage of the pentagon covered in smoke and rubble, I was on the phone wanting to speak to my family. Once a military icon like the pentagon is on fire, its not too many steps to see a nuke being lobbed at Afghanistan in response, and it all going haywire from then on. Thank fuck it didn't go that way, but I don't blame anyone for feeling jittery on the day.
feel free to leave the planet and go produce your own music and your own software and your own TV and games. Just don't expect everyone else who has bills to pay to produce all that stuff while you sit on your ass bitching.
if the artists think it is a good deal, they will upload their content. if they do not then they wont. Who are you to second guess the motivations of those artists? I am in a similar situation. If you buy direct from my site, I get over 90% of sale price, if you buy the same game from yahoo, I likely get under 40%. But this doesn't mean yahoo are evil or I am being fucked over, it means that I have made a rational business decision that piggybacking on yahoos audience is worth the lower royalty rate to me. I willingly signed that deal, just like musicians may willingly use this site.
The *only* situation where this breaks down and the artists really is fucked over is if a song is being distributed without cost and without their permission. When you do that, you take away the artists freedom to make distribution decisions that he sees as being in his interests.
bill gates didn't take any money from me. He sells a product (windows). I bought a copy, and am pretty happy with it. Given my awareness of FREE alternatives, the fact he got a sale says a lot about his product. Unlike 99% of people who provide a product for me in return for my money, bill has pledged to take his billions and do something about disease in Africa. He isn't spending it all on gold-plated hummers, or his own personal island, or a collection of massive diamonds for his wife. He was the richest guy on the planet, and he is giving almost all of his money to help the poorest people in the world. It takes a very special kind of blinded, religious extremist whining to hate the guy for that.
Thats an insane amount. I can't even vaguely imagine how I would use more than 30 gig a month downloads. And 90% of that is me using the BBC iplayer because I don't own a video player or DVD recorder. Without those, it's probably under 5 gig a month tops, and thats mostly web surfing, the odd youtube vid and multiplayer gaming. Fuck it, with so many 'triple A' games abandoning the PC, there aren't even any stupidly big demos to download anymore.
Unless you are some kid who thinks he is 'sticking it to the man' by downloading every single hollywood movie in HD (presumably so can watch it whilst snorting about how much it sucks and that the producers business model is flawed) from dodgy torrent sites, I don't see how anyone has any serious need for this.
I'm sure some smug slashdotters will equate this to the 640k quote, but tell me exactly how my need for digital data downloaded to my PC is going to go much higher in the next ten years?
He's gotten so caught up in hating Bill Gates, Microsoft, and a copyright-based economy that he can't the positive side to any of it. If the Gates Foundation eliminated malaria or AIDS, you can bet Stallman would be complaining about them driving a native African species to extinction.
The more I think about it, the more happy I am with this immature bullshit from the hippy stallman. I've always thought him to be a retarded, arrogant, obsessive maniac, and the fact that he would rather kids in Africa died from disease than admit that someone who supported copyright had helped save their lives is great news. It just makes public how retarded, ignorant and selfish the attitudes of the anti-copyright nazis are. I hope the guy becomes a fucking public laughing stock. Anti-copyright dicks have to work hard to get even lower in my estimation, but this guy has managed it today.
well said, but it doesn't go down well here at slashdot. The problem with it, is that it doesnt allow people to justify the downloading of all the hollywood movies and music and games that they want without paying for them.
The mindset of the anti-copyright lobby is basically jumping through whatever mental hoops are needed, regardless of implication, as long as you get to download spiderman 3 without paying. This stallman guy is just as bad, apparently he would rather the people who got malaria jabs thanks to bill gates would just fucking die, so he can stay in his sad mental comfort zone where TEH MICROSOFT ARE TEH EVIL. I don't know why the fuck people don't see stallman for the delusional and ignorant hippy that he is. What the fuck has he ever done to help the poor?
the thing you are doing right now is called "talking cock".
Seriously kid, you need to grow some brain cells, and get a job, stop leeching off the honest people in society. Nobody likes fucking thieves and leechers like you.
"This is where you are 100% wrong. A 99% reduction in production of what currently passes as "art" would have no impact whatsoever as the only thing that profit motive motivates is utter kitsch."
says who?
Do you atcually KNOW the neural activity of everyone who produces entertainment content? Of course you fucking don't. You have *no idea* whether Jane Austen wrote mainly for the money, or whether Sean Connery only acted for the cash. You just like to tell yourself that everyone who has talent in terms of entertainment MUST be doing it just for the love of it, (despite the fact that there is fuck all evidence of this), because its part of the mental gymnastics people like you are forced to employ in order to justify taking other peoples work for free.
You rate the time of a plumber who is barely competent to be higher than the time of the most talented writer / songwriter / musician and actor on earth.
In order to pay his rent, you would willingly send spielberg to stack shelves in wal mart wouldn't you? What an incredibly silly point of view.
pathetic ain't it. Apparently a plumbers work is infinitely more valuable than a computer programmer, by that definition. Still, whatever makes you feel OK about taking other peoples work for free I guess...
errr... could it be that big companies, by definition, pay a lot of tax to the government, and create a lot of jobs. If a government is not looking after big companies, its likely not looking after the economy either, and not surprisingly, that would be a bad move. There are people whose jobs depend on IP law. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions of them. Those people vote, and pay taxes.
Its funny to see the VERO program criticised for being too strict, as I'm sure given ebays incompetence, it can sometimes be. My experience with VERO is that it is useless to actually do anything about blatantly stolen property (in other words, people duplicating full versions of games on a CD burner, and openly selling them on ebay). In cases like this, ebay are VERY VERY slow to respond, and take no serious action against the sellers, sometimes removing a listing, rarely banning an account (new account takes a few hours).
For smaller IP holders like me, ebay and google are both unresponsive, disinterested bastards. Try getting pirated content removed from a blogger blog, for example...
What will be essential for a flash-web is an off button that lets me turn off any flashy repeating flickering and flashing adverts or other pieces of flashing content on a page. I am not a small kitten that wants to look at the bright flashy thing. if I'm at your website, I'm likely looking for information, so stop flashing at me. there is a good reason amazon and google don't have flashing animations anywhere.
really? You are postulating that an interactive media will not affect behaviour past age 14? Whereas everyone on earth would accept that a passive media (advertising) has a massive effect on the behaviour of people of all ages. If it didn't, it wouldn't be a multi-billion dollar industry. It may have *less* effect, but it DEFINITELY has some effect.
security through obscurity? If I was a resistance fighter in Burma, I'd want better than that. A system designed to let geeks take movies for free is a different security priority to one that prevents me getting a bullet through my skull.
Nobody is even discussing how you might have a legit need for this stuff anyway, its all "this will teach the RIAA!!!!" etc....
So your strategy would be to just let tens of thousands of legacy apps that a huge chunk of your customers own, to suddenly just stop working. I don't think you can build a global software business on that basis.
What dork on here keeps slinging around this infantile put down of IP as 'imaginary property'? I'll make a deal with you, You respect the Intellectual property of others, and the banks will respect your imaginary wealth stored as a string of numbers on a bank computer. deal? After all, your bank balance is imaginary property too. *sigh*
Look, I totally get how encryption and plausible deniabiltiy is great if you people are circulating dangerous information about government conspiracies, or organising the resistance in Burma or Zimbabwe, but lets face facts, this will be used to share torrents of Hollywood movies and top 40 albums.
This is stupid.
Either accept the fact that all the political posturing about free being a better business model is true, in which case, just go enjoy all the free music/software/games/movies out there, or admit its just smokescreens to justify getting Hollywood movies for free, whilst your entertainment is subsidised by everyone who paid to see that stuff, and thus allow it to be made.
People seem to have this attitude that this kind of thing is cool because it lets you escape prosecution for copyright infringement. If copyright is such a fucked-up system, then why is it all the stuff people want to share is produced under that system? Surely all the cool movies/software/music/games is being produced under the free model right? Or could it be that the free model isn't viable, or popular with content producers, big and small...
oh come on, if vista had not done anything to address the problem of windows apps running as admin, you would be here typing the same anti-vista whine, this time bitching that they did nothing about security.
I'm with the GP here, heck, I'm a flipping bedroom coder, and even *I* knew back in the days when XP was new, that you do not save data outside of the MyDocuments branch, and coded appropriately. anyone who carried on ignoring that guideline is just fucking lazy. And to top it all, vista even accommodates them! by virtualizing the locations and keeping the true file write destination hidden from those legacy apps.
I wish vista was much smaller and more modular, and had better performance, but the reasons you give for criticising it are just lame.
Slashdot Mirror
"You're doing something that doesn't harm anyone in any way"
Let me guess, you don't rely on selling games for a living do you?
You are talking shit. long winded shit to justify stealing games, just don't embarrass yourself by this rationalizing to people who actually lose sales to piracy...
If I make a game, and you want to play it, and you refuse to pay me for my work, you are a thief. you can type pages of bullshit to try and weasel out of it, I'll always call a thief a thief, a leech a leech and a scumbag with a sense of entitlement a scumbag with a sense of entitlement.
if you bought someone elses game, their game was better, and the free market is working fine.
If you actually preferred his game, yet you decided to take it and not pay for it, you just blew that free market to bits. He thinks nobody likes his game, makes no sequel, and maybe goes out of business.
Markets rely on signals, ideally in the form of money going from satisfied consumers to efficient producers. If you can't see how subverting the whole signaling process isn't the same as buying from a competitor... then I don't know how else to explain it.
Understand that when content producers say they are deprived of revenue they are being SPECIFIC. They mean that someone who knew of the product and WANTED the product, did not pay for it. Nobody expects to get revenue for something that the customer didn't want, and this is NOT the issue. It only ever comes up when people desperately try to talk themselves into thinking pirating stuff is harmless.
It isn't.
If you make a product, you evaluate how many people are likely to be in the target market, and put up huge up-front costs to create a product that will make a profit if a reasonable proportion of the target market that wants it, buys it.
If you download (steal/copy whatever the fuck makes you sleep at night) the game, then clearly you were in the target market and wanted it.
But you just shrunk that potential target market by 1.
Now lets assume that everyone acts like you. whats the new target market size?
0
Whats the amount of new products it makes sense to fund?
0
Well done. you just killed off gaming, unless of course, you assume that 99% of people are honest, and you can leech off the products that they pay o have created.
So maybe you aren't a thief, or a pirate, just a freeloading leech.
Happy?
I make games for a living. I know every days, dozens if not hundreds of potential customers who would otherwise help me stay in business just steal the games from the web. They like the games, they want them, they just think its beneath them to pay the guy who made them. How motivated do you think this makes me to keep making PC games? as opposed to business software?
There is a good reason so few developers give a fuck about the PC platform these days.
is that so mad? I remembe catching a train out of london that day, and being a bit nervous about the whole 'being in a packed capital city that jet airliners fly over every minute' until I got home (out of London)
It's easy to forget the uncertainty of that day. The first plane was an accident, the second and some heavy shit was going down. By the time I saw footage of the pentagon covered in smoke and rubble, I was on the phone wanting to speak to my family. Once a military icon like the pentagon is on fire, its not too many steps to see a nuke being lobbed at Afghanistan in response, and it all going haywire from then on.
Thank fuck it didn't go that way, but I don't blame anyone for feeling jittery on the day.
feel free to leave the planet and go produce your own music and your own software and your own TV and games.
Just don't expect everyone else who has bills to pay to produce all that stuff while you sit on your ass bitching.
if the artists think it is a good deal, they will upload their content. if they do not then they wont. Who are you to second guess the motivations of those artists?
I am in a similar situation. If you buy direct from my site, I get over 90% of sale price, if you buy the same game from yahoo, I likely get under 40%. But this doesn't mean yahoo are evil or I am being fucked over, it means that I have made a rational business decision that piggybacking on yahoos audience is worth the lower royalty rate to me. I willingly signed that deal, just like musicians may willingly use this site.
The *only* situation where this breaks down and the artists really is fucked over is if a song is being distributed without cost and without their permission. When you do that, you take away the artists freedom to make distribution decisions that he sees as being in his interests.
I know who pirates, its people like you who arrogantly assume the world owes them a fucking living.
bill gates didn't take any money from me. He sells a product (windows). I bought a copy, and am pretty happy with it. Given my awareness of FREE alternatives, the fact he got a sale says a lot about his product.
Unlike 99% of people who provide a product for me in return for my money, bill has pledged to take his billions and do something about disease in Africa. He isn't spending it all on gold-plated hummers, or his own personal island, or a collection of massive diamonds for his wife. He was the richest guy on the planet, and he is giving almost all of his money to help the poorest people in the world.
It takes a very special kind of blinded, religious extremist whining to hate the guy for that.
Thats an insane amount. I can't even vaguely imagine how I would use more than 30 gig a month downloads. And 90% of that is me using the BBC iplayer because I don't own a video player or DVD recorder. Without those, it's probably under 5 gig a month tops, and thats mostly web surfing, the odd youtube vid and multiplayer gaming.
Fuck it, with so many 'triple A' games abandoning the PC, there aren't even any stupidly big demos to download anymore.
Unless you are some kid who thinks he is 'sticking it to the man' by downloading every single hollywood movie in HD (presumably so can watch it whilst snorting about how much it sucks and that the producers business model is flawed) from dodgy torrent sites, I don't see how anyone has any serious need for this.
I'm sure some smug slashdotters will equate this to the 640k quote, but tell me exactly how my need for digital data downloaded to my PC is going to go much higher in the next ten years?
He's gotten so caught up in hating Bill Gates, Microsoft, and a copyright-based economy that he can't the positive side to any of it. If the Gates Foundation eliminated malaria or AIDS, you can bet Stallman would be complaining about them driving a native African species to extinction.
The more I think about it, the more happy I am with this immature bullshit from the hippy stallman. I've always thought him to be a retarded, arrogant, obsessive maniac, and the fact that he would rather kids in Africa died from disease than admit that someone who supported copyright had helped save their lives is great news. It just makes public how retarded, ignorant and selfish the attitudes of the anti-copyright nazis are.
I hope the guy becomes a fucking public laughing stock. Anti-copyright dicks have to work hard to get even lower in my estimation, but this guy has managed it today.
well said, but it doesn't go down well here at slashdot. The problem with it, is that it doesnt allow people to justify the downloading of all the hollywood movies and music and games that they want without paying for them.
The mindset of the anti-copyright lobby is basically jumping through whatever mental hoops are needed, regardless of implication, as long as you get to download spiderman 3 without paying.
This stallman guy is just as bad, apparently he would rather the people who got malaria jabs thanks to bill gates would just fucking die, so he can stay in his sad mental comfort zone where TEH MICROSOFT ARE TEH EVIL.
I don't know why the fuck people don't see stallman for the delusional and ignorant hippy that he is. What the fuck has he ever done to help the poor?
the thing you are doing right now is called "talking cock".
Seriously kid, you need to grow some brain cells, and get a job, stop leeching off the honest people in society. Nobody likes fucking thieves and leechers like you.
i knew you couldn't stop yourself from replying. i haven't read this latest drivel from you.
heres a hint kid
fuck off and get a job ok? then you can talk to the grown ups...
"until a silk-suited agent of a media conglomerate shows up"
"Given that Spielberg hasn't produced any art in his entire life (and probably couldn't if his life depended on it"
God you are pathetic. let me try in capitals.
DO YOU FUCKING UNDERSTAND THAT NOT ALL CREATIVE PEOPLE WORK FOR BIG MEGA CONGLOMERATES?
DO YOU UNDERSTAND THAT UNLIKE ELITIST PRICKS SUCH AS YOURSELF TENS OF MILLIONS OF PEOPLE APPRECIATE PEOPLE LIKE STEPHEN SPIELBERG?
If you don't like popular culture, then fine, fuck off and enjoy your French jazz dance in a little room, just dont try and lecture the rest of us.
Don't bother replying, it will just be more piracy-justifying ego-wank.
"This is where you are 100% wrong. A 99% reduction in production of what currently passes as "art" would have no impact whatsoever as the only thing that profit motive motivates is utter kitsch."
says who?
Do you atcually KNOW the neural activity of everyone who produces entertainment content? Of course you fucking don't. You have *no idea* whether Jane Austen wrote mainly for the money, or whether Sean Connery only acted for the cash. You just like to tell yourself that everyone who has talent in terms of entertainment MUST be doing it just for the love of it, (despite the fact that there is fuck all evidence of this), because its part of the mental gymnastics people like you are forced to employ in order to justify taking other peoples work for free.
You rate the time of a plumber who is barely competent to be higher than the time of the most talented writer / songwriter / musician and actor on earth.
In order to pay his rent, you would willingly send spielberg to stack shelves in wal mart wouldn't you?
What an incredibly silly point of view.
pathetic ain't it. Apparently a plumbers work is infinitely more valuable than a computer programmer, by that definition.
Still, whatever makes you feel OK about taking other peoples work for free I guess...
errr... could it be that big companies, by definition, pay a lot of tax to the government, and create a lot of jobs. If a government is not looking after big companies, its likely not looking after the economy either, and not surprisingly, that would be a bad move.
There are people whose jobs depend on IP law. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions of them. Those people vote, and pay taxes.
Its funny to see the VERO program criticised for being too strict, as I'm sure given ebays incompetence, it can sometimes be.
My experience with VERO is that it is useless to actually do anything about blatantly stolen property (in other words, people duplicating full versions of games on a CD burner, and openly selling them on ebay). In cases like this, ebay are VERY VERY slow to respond, and take no serious action against the sellers, sometimes removing a listing, rarely banning an account (new account takes a few hours).
For smaller IP holders like me, ebay and google are both unresponsive, disinterested bastards. Try getting pirated content removed from a blogger blog, for example...
What will be essential for a flash-web is an off button that lets me turn off any flashy repeating flickering and flashing adverts or other pieces of flashing content on a page.
I am not a small kitten that wants to look at the bright flashy thing. if I'm at your website, I'm likely looking for information, so stop flashing at me.
there is a good reason amazon and google don't have flashing animations anywhere.
really?
You are postulating that an interactive media will not affect behaviour past age 14?
Whereas everyone on earth would accept that a passive media (advertising) has a massive effect on the behaviour of people of all ages. If it didn't, it wouldn't be a multi-billion dollar industry.
It may have *less* effect, but it DEFINITELY has some effect.
security through obscurity? If I was a resistance fighter in Burma, I'd want better than that. A system designed to let geeks take movies for free is a different security priority to one that prevents me getting a bullet through my skull.
Nobody is even discussing how you might have a legit need for this stuff anyway, its all "this will teach the RIAA!!!!" etc....
So your strategy would be to just let tens of thousands of legacy apps that a huge chunk of your customers own, to suddenly just stop working.
I don't think you can build a global software business on that basis.
What dork on here keeps slinging around this infantile put down of IP as 'imaginary property'? I'll make a deal with you, You respect the Intellectual property of others, and the banks will respect your imaginary wealth stored as a string of numbers on a bank computer. deal?
After all, your bank balance is imaginary property too.
*sigh*
Look, I totally get how encryption and plausible deniabiltiy is great if you people are circulating dangerous information about government conspiracies, or organising the resistance in Burma or Zimbabwe, but lets face facts, this will be used to share torrents of Hollywood movies and top 40 albums.
This is stupid.
Either accept the fact that all the political posturing about free being a better business model is true, in which case, just go enjoy all the free music/software/games/movies out there, or admit its just smokescreens to justify getting Hollywood movies for free, whilst your entertainment is subsidised by everyone who paid to see that stuff, and thus allow it to be made.
People seem to have this attitude that this kind of thing is cool because it lets you escape prosecution for copyright infringement. If copyright is such a fucked-up system, then why is it all the stuff people want to share is produced under that system? Surely all the cool movies/software/music/games is being produced under the free model right? Or could it be that the free model isn't viable, or popular with content producers, big and small...
oh come on, if vista had not done anything to address the problem of windows apps running as admin, you would be here typing the same anti-vista whine, this time bitching that they did nothing about security.
I'm with the GP here, heck, I'm a flipping bedroom coder, and even *I* knew back in the days when XP was new, that you do not save data outside of the MyDocuments branch, and coded appropriately. anyone who carried on ignoring that guideline is just fucking lazy.
And to top it all, vista even accommodates them! by virtualizing the locations and keeping the true file write destination hidden from those legacy apps.
I wish vista was much smaller and more modular, and had better performance, but the reasons you give for criticising it are just lame.