If someone wants to sell a game for Windows, they rightfully want to make sure they are selling ONE copy, because if you want the distribution rights to bioshock, rather than the playing rights, that's maybe $4million vs $30. So quite rightly they take steps to force the product to be non distributable. that's not an invasion of your privacy or your flipping human rights. If you want to get upset about human rights, go to Burma right now, or campaign against North Korea or Iran. Whining that you cant copy your games from your mates is pretty low and pathetic on the "look I'm being repressed!" scale...
Insightful? give me a break. you are just whining whilst making no attempt to explain how content creators get paid without the ability to prevent piracy. I'll restate your complaint:
"Tax has no right to exist, and anyone who implements it should be severely punished. Tax should be resisted by any and all means necessary. We deserve a Tax free future, but we will have to fight for it. Do everything you can to end Tax today."
An ignorant and one-sided, silly position, but no different to your post. Unless you want no entertainment or digital content to be produced? (or only produced by hobbyists). personally I LIKE professionally made entertainment content, and don't mind paying for it.
what people will buy the movies? other 'lesser' people who don't understand how to steal them? Face facts, if you pirate all your content, then you are leeching off people who are honest. your actions are only possible because other people make your lifestyle viable by paying for what they want to see. I don't see how fanatical pirates don't see that they are the ultimate leechers, always hoping some other mug will pick up the bill for their life...
does 'the next generation' of Swedish voters assume they will be working for free making movies for everyone? or do they want to continue a system where foreigners (Americans mostly) do all the work making stuff, where the swedes just get to take it all for free whilst sat on their ass?
I think you overstate the percentage of the voting public who give a shit. 99% of people I know have no idea what thepiratebay is, or what it does. I'd guess pretty much all of them would realise the site is breaking a law (or at least encouraging its users to do so) and wouldn't have much sympathy, Yes, there are a lot of people on slashdot who get very defensive about their right to take copyrighted stuff, but try stopping someone in the street and asking the ten most important things that affect their votes. I'd reckon:
Crime Income Taxes Transport House Prices Education Health Pensions Terrorism Inequality
I reckon the rights of people with broadband to download free rips of Hollywood movies might come in at number 70 or 90, but its sure isn't swinging most peoples vote.
so someone openly and plainly selling you a game which needs to connect to the web every TEN DAYS is 'buttfucking' you? Get some fucking perspective. This is why devs move to consoles, PC gamers treat any attempt to prevent piracy as the end of the world, so why even bother with the platform if this is th mentality of the potential 'customer'?
How do you think pirating Bioshock helped? You just lost ALL moral authority to whine about the action of anyone here. If A developer spends 5 million dollars making a game, you bet their ass its up to THEM the terms on which they sell it. If you dislike the copy protection and fear you will have a seizure and your head will explode if you have securom installed, then DON'T BUY THE GAME. But do not be under ANY illusion that you are IN ANY WAY entitled to play the game anyway. People with your attitude (I don't like the terms of sale, so I'll just take it) are the entire reason DRM exists. Honest gamers like me have securom installed by their purchased games because people like you will pirate them at the first opportunity. Yet I bet in your head, nothing is your fault, its all those evil bastard game devs making games you want so badly you will steal them rather than stick to your principles.
I bought Bioshock, it installed securom, it works fine, I wouldn't even know or care that it was there. Anything that stops leechers pirating games is fine with me.
and what would your solution be? Because unless the site IS taken down immediately the system works like this:
1)Thieving bastard uploads copyrighted material to anon filehoster. 2)Copyright owner immediately sends out a DMCA notice. 3)several days pass while filehoster fails to contact uploader or assess the claims validity. meanwhile hundreds or thousands of people are actively stealing work belonging to the copyright holder. 4)By the time the file is finally removed, anon hoster instantly uploads it again, gaining another 1-2 weeks of free, anonymous copyrighted hosting.
If you don't have a situation where the DMCA is acted on immediately you are basically advocating the abandonment of copyright, which despite being a totally stupid POV, is probably quite popular here. The DMCA is there to stop copyright holders being ripped off. But slashdot only run a story if a DMCA notice is wrong, you never care if it was legit, and some thieving bastard was ripping people off. Thats 'sticking it to the man' apparently.
excellent post, thank god I'm not the only one who thinks that there is a BIG difference between being 'influenced' by someone elses work, and then just fucking re-printing the damed thing and expecting to be paid for it. The harry potter court case was totally justified. If you want to write your own story with a boy wizard hero, go for it, but if you are too lazy or too un-imaginitive to even flipping rename the characters, expect to (rightfully) be sued for it.
Well I have the ability to control every aspect of the hi fi in my car with my finegrtips on the control stick thing whilst still holding the wheel. Rather than using any supra-high-tech-military-glove-interface, they just stick the buttons near the steering wheel. Seems to work perfectly, and is likely way cheaper than wearing some 'data glove'
"Personally, I feel quite strongly that music should be 100% free and shared. Musicians should make their money on tours or other life performances. That's pretty much the way it was for all of human history before the recording industry came around within the last century."
Others may feel that way about all property. After all, for probably BILLIONS of years, there was no concept of property at all, so why the hell should "The Duke of Westminster" own half of the property in London? Native Americans had no concept of personal property, so why don't we go back to their system? I'd suspect you would suddenly get every worked up if one of them drove off in your car for a day...
I'd also like to see evidence that musicians 'just produce music for a few years and then do nothing for the rest of their life". How many musicians keep on making music despite being millionaires? And I like the 'few years' bit. Are you counting the ten or more years when they were struggling musicians you hadn't heard of?
Plus, take a look a Richard Branson or Steve Jobs. they just wrote software for a few years, and then could do nothing for the rest of their lives. Is that fair? How about the guy who invented the milk carton, he is a billionaire. Just for inventing the milk carton. He doesn't have to work either.
I still don't see ANY justification for why people who make a lot of money making something you can steal at thepiratebay are EVIL whereas people who make a way bigger fortune making stuff you can't steal etc are somehow just regular guys who lived the American dream. face facts, its backwards-justifying being able to rip off musicians, when you haven't found a guy to rip off Branson or the tetrapack guy.
"It might not be the crap music and videos games you like"
be careful buddy, you let your holier-than-thou snobbishness leak out a little there. if mere peasants like me and 95% of the population are happy to buy our 'crappy music and video games' why the fuck do we need arrogant elitist pricks like you to dictate what we are allowed to enjoy?
"People should be paid for doing, not paid for something they have done."
as a matter of interest, what is your view of inheritance tax? Surly it should be 100% right? 23% of the richest 1,000 people in the UK did NOTHING to get the money but be born with rich parents. They are paid for doing nothing, and never have contributed anything whatsoever. Surely if your principle holds, it should be illegal for your parents to leave you anything in their will right? If not, explain to me the difference.
You are not a fool at all, you are an honest person who values the work others do. Thankfully, you are still just about in the majority, because if you were not, we literally would have nobody making music, games, movies or TV shows. (cue some idiot suggesting that youtube is an equivalent to Hollywood - if free content is so good, why is it in no torrent sites top 10?). It *is* scary how much the prevailing groupthink of slashdot is that "teh copyright owners are teh Satan" and that man is born with a god given right to food, shelter, and free music and movies. Especially because/. is mainly american, and americans are increasingly dependent on intellectual property for their economy.
The thing that amazes me is that people in 'the file sharing community' get really annoyed by two things: 1) people not 'thanking them for their work' when they upload someone elses work for free and 2) Leeching.
Seeing as the file sharers can only take all this free content because people like you and me pay the full price for it, it seems ironic that leeching is seen as so bad by a huge community built entirely upon the idea of leeching from everyone else. tbh slashdot stopped being a serious tech news site ages ago, its practically a blog for content piracy now:(
wtf? read again. my whole point is you would get LESS music. And you want music and video games made in a system of patronage? Forget Bioshock, look out for PepsiShock! and I cant wait tos ee the list of state-approved musicians you have in mind. People will actually rationalise state control of entertainment to get away with justifying music piracy. amazing...
6 Ernesto and Kirsty Bertarelli, Pharmaceuticals £5,650m (New entry)
Theres your top placed science entry, doing pretty well with a value of almost 12 billion dollars.
I don't see why you have to do the 'minimum' enforcement of contract laws in order to encourage minimal amounts of music to be produced. In a free market, where there is no copyright infringement, what we want is to create the greatest amount of satisfaction for everyone in the economy. If that means that people spend 5% or 20% or 1% of their disposable income on music, then that's fine. Obviously if we are spending 20% we will have way more musicians producing music full time. if people spend 1%, then you will have less music. How ever many people make music for a hobby, those people need to eat, and the best musicians produce the most music when they dont need a day job in Tescos. The problem with copyright infringement, is you have s situation where a perfect market would allow us to spend 10%, and get 10% worth of enjoyment from the resulting music, but in fact we only spend 1% (or whatever) and the difference is made up by copyright infringement. By definition, we have a net loss to society, because the difference (in the LONG term) is made up by potential musicians becoming plumbers and bankers instead. In other words, in a situation where we cant equate peoples enjoyment to material rewards that encourage the creators of that enjoyment to create more, society loses out. That might seem a bit harsh and analytical, but if you assume rational consumers and a perfect market, surely that conclusion is inescapable?
said by someone who presumably has a day job that pays the bills. Why is it ok for some people to have high paid jobs in IT, or sales or law, and enjoy listening to music thats free, whereas the people who actually make the music are forbidden from earning the money generated by their work? is this some way you are dreaming up to 'punish' people whose talent happens to be making music rather than configuring routers? I don't see why people split society in two halves., the 'creative' types who are forced to work for free (or low wages) to entertain the rest of society, who apparently can happily enjoy all the fruits of capitalism and be rich as hell.
Take a look at the UKs sunday times rich list (1,000 richest people in the UK). hardly any of them are musicians, yet the internet mentality is to treat the musicians who make money as evil capitalist scum, but the guy who is a multi billionaire from making milk cartons gets buy with just a slap on the back and a thumbs up.
I'd buy metallicas album if I wanted to own it. Whether they are penniless or billionaires doesn't affect my enjoyment of it.
I wish people were spending that money on video games, but no, your average slashdotter probably pirates 99% of the games he plays too.
If you pirate content, the content provider won't make any more, because it didn't sell and he has rent to pay too. the #1 best way you can ensure nobody makes stuff you enjoy, is to pirate the stuff you enjoy.
America is the home of Hollywood, and a big chunk of the worlds popular music. Why are you surprised that the nation actually making all this stuff acts harder to stop it being taken for free? I'm sure nobody in Romania cares what impact file sharing has on American jobs.
I don't see why this is so wrong. Unless you want 10% of the population to be government employees watching everything that goes on, corporations HAVE to work with government to avoid breaking the law. It's illegal in the UK for kids to walk into a store and buy alcohol. And amazingly, the checkout workers are trained to not sell it to them. I'm sure they would find their job easier if they could operate like total drones and not bother looking at the customer, or asking for ID, but they have to do so. Pretty much everyone accepts that as a reasonable thing to do. And they have other laws to obey too, you can't even buy more than a certain amount of headache pills in one go in the UK, and if you buy a TV, the store has to inform the TV license people where you live. This is all a case of private companies having to report or prevent illegal activity. Theres nothing unusual here. The only reason people are upset is that the people who are losing out when copyright is infringed are private companies, whereas in the cases I list above, it perceived to be the public as a whole. I can understand an argument against draconian copyright law, and understand how you would want to lobby to change that law, but don't kid yourself that there is anything unusual or unacceptable about the government requiring private companies to assist them in enforcing the law. This is nothing new.
People who want to change copyright law should lobby politicians and vote accordingly. Just breaking the law and complaining that its too easy to get caught isn't achieving anything. Real campaigners against unjust laws WANT to get caught so they can fight their case in public.
Slashdot Mirror
wtf?
what monopoly platform is that?
If someone wants to sell a game for Windows, they rightfully want to make sure they are selling ONE copy, because if you want the distribution rights to bioshock, rather than the playing rights, that's maybe $4million vs $30.
So quite rightly they take steps to force the product to be non distributable.
that's not an invasion of your privacy or your flipping human rights. If you want to get upset about human rights, go to Burma right now, or campaign against North Korea or Iran. Whining that you cant copy your games from your mates is pretty low and pathetic on the "look I'm being repressed!" scale...
Insightful? give me a break. you are just whining whilst making no attempt to explain how content creators get paid without the ability to prevent piracy. I'll restate your complaint:
"Tax has no right to exist, and anyone who implements it should be severely punished. Tax should be resisted by any and all means necessary. We deserve a Tax free future, but we will have to fight for it. Do everything you can to end Tax today."
An ignorant and one-sided, silly position, but no different to your post.
Unless you want no entertainment or digital content to be produced? (or only produced by hobbyists). personally I LIKE professionally made entertainment content, and don't mind paying for it.
what people will buy the movies? other 'lesser' people who don't understand how to steal them?
Face facts, if you pirate all your content, then you are leeching off people who are honest. your actions are only possible because other people make your lifestyle viable by paying for what they want to see.
I don't see how fanatical pirates don't see that they are the ultimate leechers, always hoping some other mug will pick up the bill for their life...
A quick question:
does 'the next generation' of Swedish voters assume they will be working for free making movies for everyone? or do they want to continue a system where foreigners (Americans mostly) do all the work making stuff, where the swedes just get to take it all for free whilst sat on their ass?
Just asking.
I think you overstate the percentage of the voting public who give a shit. 99% of people I know have no idea what thepiratebay is, or what it does. I'd guess pretty much all of them would realise the site is breaking a law (or at least encouraging its users to do so) and wouldn't have much sympathy,
Yes, there are a lot of people on slashdot who get very defensive about their right to take copyrighted stuff, but try stopping someone in the street and asking the ten most important things that affect their votes. I'd reckon:
Crime
Income
Taxes
Transport
House Prices
Education
Health
Pensions
Terrorism
Inequality
I reckon the rights of people with broadband to download free rips of Hollywood movies might come in at number 70 or 90, but its sure isn't swinging most peoples vote.
so someone openly and plainly selling you a game which needs to connect to the web every TEN DAYS is 'buttfucking' you?
Get some fucking perspective.
This is why devs move to consoles, PC gamers treat any attempt to prevent piracy as the end of the world, so why even bother with the platform if this is th mentality of the potential 'customer'?
How do you think pirating Bioshock helped? You just lost ALL moral authority to whine about the action of anyone here. If A developer spends 5 million dollars making a game, you bet their ass its up to THEM the terms on which they sell it. If you dislike the copy protection and fear you will have a seizure and your head will explode if you have securom installed, then DON'T BUY THE GAME. But do not be under ANY illusion that you are IN ANY WAY entitled to play the game anyway.
People with your attitude (I don't like the terms of sale, so I'll just take it) are the entire reason DRM exists. Honest gamers like me have securom installed by their purchased games because people like you will pirate them at the first opportunity.
Yet I bet in your head, nothing is your fault, its all those evil bastard game devs making games you want so badly you will steal them rather than stick to your principles.
I bought Bioshock, it installed securom, it works fine, I wouldn't even know or care that it was there. Anything that stops leechers pirating games is fine with me.
fine, as long as we can charge the exact same fine to every single person who breaks the DMCA by uploading copyrighted material.
deal?
and what would your solution be? Because unless the site IS taken down immediately the system works like this:
1)Thieving bastard uploads copyrighted material to anon filehoster.
2)Copyright owner immediately sends out a DMCA notice.
3)several days pass while filehoster fails to contact uploader or assess the claims validity. meanwhile hundreds or thousands of people are actively stealing work belonging to the copyright holder.
4)By the time the file is finally removed, anon hoster instantly uploads it again, gaining another 1-2 weeks of free, anonymous copyrighted hosting.
If you don't have a situation where the DMCA is acted on immediately you are basically advocating the abandonment of copyright, which despite being a totally stupid POV, is probably quite popular here.
The DMCA is there to stop copyright holders being ripped off. But slashdot only run a story if a DMCA notice is wrong, you never care if it was legit, and some thieving bastard was ripping people off. Thats 'sticking it to the man' apparently.
what's wrong with this idea? It sounds pretty good to me.
excellent post, thank god I'm not the only one who thinks that there is a BIG difference between being 'influenced' by someone elses work, and then just fucking re-printing the damed thing and expecting to be paid for it.
The harry potter court case was totally justified. If you want to write your own story with a boy wizard hero, go for it, but if you are too lazy or too un-imaginitive to even flipping rename the characters, expect to (rightfully) be sued for it.
Well I have the ability to control every aspect of the hi fi in my car with my finegrtips on the control stick thing whilst still holding the wheel. Rather than using any supra-high-tech-military-glove-interface, they just stick the buttons near the steering wheel.
Seems to work perfectly, and is likely way cheaper than wearing some 'data glove'
"Personally, I feel quite strongly that music should be 100% free and shared. Musicians should make their money on tours or other life performances. That's pretty much the way it was for all of human history before the recording industry came around within the last century."
Others may feel that way about all property. After all, for probably BILLIONS of years, there was no concept of property at all, so why the hell should "The Duke of Westminster" own half of the property in London? Native Americans had no concept of personal property, so why don't we go back to their system? I'd suspect you would suddenly get every worked up if one of them drove off in your car for a day...
I'd also like to see evidence that musicians 'just produce music for a few years and then do nothing for the rest of their life". How many musicians keep on making music despite being millionaires? And I like the 'few years' bit. Are you counting the ten or more years when they were struggling musicians you hadn't heard of?
Plus, take a look a Richard Branson or Steve Jobs. they just wrote software for a few years, and then could do nothing for the rest of their lives. Is that fair?
How about the guy who invented the milk carton, he is a billionaire. Just for inventing the milk carton. He doesn't have to work either.
I still don't see ANY justification for why people who make a lot of money making something you can steal at thepiratebay are EVIL whereas people who make a way bigger fortune making stuff you can't steal etc are somehow just regular guys who lived the American dream.
face facts, its backwards-justifying being able to rip off musicians, when you haven't found a guy to rip off Branson or the tetrapack guy.
No mention of it, so it sounds like you will be paying this as a premium just to try out the editor before the game is finished, which doesn't appeal.
"It might not be the crap music and videos games you like"
be careful buddy, you let your holier-than-thou snobbishness leak out a little there.
if mere peasants like me and 95% of the population are happy to buy our 'crappy music and video games' why the fuck do we need arrogant elitist pricks like you to dictate what we are allowed to enjoy?
Is this a joke?
patronage...
Ok cool, so we will have the music and the movies that the government and the wealthy would like yes?
Kiss goodbye the grand theft auto
Kiss goodbye to punk music
Kiss goodbye to pretty much anything that criticises the war on terror or inequality.
Its amazing what crap people will cling to if it lets them feel good about ripping off musicians...
"People should be paid for doing, not paid for something they have done."
as a matter of interest, what is your view of inheritance tax?
Surly it should be 100% right?
23% of the richest 1,000 people in the UK did NOTHING to get the money but be born with rich parents. They are paid for doing nothing, and never have contributed anything whatsoever.
Surely if your principle holds, it should be illegal for your parents to leave you anything in their will right?
If not, explain to me the difference.
You are not a fool at all, you are an honest person who values the work others do. Thankfully, you are still just about in the majority, because if you were not, we literally would have nobody making music, games, movies or TV shows. (cue some idiot suggesting that youtube is an equivalent to Hollywood - if free content is so good, why is it in no torrent sites top 10?). /. is mainly american, and americans are increasingly dependent on intellectual property for their economy.
:(
It *is* scary how much the prevailing groupthink of slashdot is that "teh copyright owners are teh Satan" and that man is born with a god given right to food, shelter, and free music and movies. Especially because
The thing that amazes me is that people in 'the file sharing community' get really annoyed by two things:
1) people not 'thanking them for their work' when they upload someone elses work for free and
2) Leeching.
Seeing as the file sharers can only take all this free content because people like you and me pay the full price for it, it seems ironic that leeching is seen as so bad by a huge community built entirely upon the idea of leeching from everyone else.
tbh slashdot stopped being a serious tech news site ages ago, its practically a blog for content piracy now
wtf?
read again.
my whole point is you would get LESS music.
And you want music and video games made in a system of patronage? Forget Bioshock, look out for PepsiShock! and I cant wait tos ee the list of state-approved musicians you have in mind.
People will actually rationalise state control of entertainment to get away with justifying music piracy. amazing...
6 Ernesto and Kirsty Bertarelli, Pharmaceuticals £5,650m (New entry)
Theres your top placed science entry, doing pretty well with a value of almost 12 billion dollars.
I don't see why you have to do the 'minimum' enforcement of contract laws in order to encourage minimal amounts of music to be produced. In a free market, where there is no copyright infringement, what we want is to create the greatest amount of satisfaction for everyone in the economy. If that means that people spend 5% or 20% or 1% of their disposable income on music, then that's fine. Obviously if we are spending 20% we will have way more musicians producing music full time. if people spend 1%, then you will have less music. How ever many people make music for a hobby, those people need to eat, and the best musicians produce the most music when they dont need a day job in Tescos.
The problem with copyright infringement, is you have s situation where a perfect market would allow us to spend 10%, and get 10% worth of enjoyment from the resulting music, but in fact we only spend 1% (or whatever) and the difference is made up by copyright infringement.
By definition, we have a net loss to society, because the difference (in the LONG term) is made up by potential musicians becoming plumbers and bankers instead. In other words, in a situation where we cant equate peoples enjoyment to material rewards that encourage the creators of that enjoyment to create more, society loses out.
That might seem a bit harsh and analytical, but if you assume rational consumers and a perfect market, surely that conclusion is inescapable?
said by someone who presumably has a day job that pays the bills. Why is it ok for some people to have high paid jobs in IT, or sales or law, and enjoy listening to music thats free, whereas the people who actually make the music are forbidden from earning the money generated by their work?
is this some way you are dreaming up to 'punish' people whose talent happens to be making music rather than configuring routers? I don't see why people split society in two halves., the 'creative' types who are forced to work for free (or low wages) to entertain the rest of society, who apparently can happily enjoy all the fruits of capitalism and be rich as hell.
Take a look at the UKs sunday times rich list (1,000 richest people in the UK). hardly any of them are musicians, yet the internet mentality is to treat the musicians who make money as evil capitalist scum, but the guy who is a multi billionaire from making milk cartons gets buy with just a slap on the back and a thumbs up.
I'd buy metallicas album if I wanted to own it. Whether they are penniless or billionaires doesn't affect my enjoyment of it.
I wish people were spending that money on video games, but no, your average slashdotter probably pirates 99% of the games he plays too.
If you pirate content, the content provider won't make any more, because it didn't sell and he has rent to pay too. the #1 best way you can ensure nobody makes stuff you enjoy, is to pirate the stuff you enjoy.
America is the home of Hollywood, and a big chunk of the worlds popular music. Why are you surprised that the nation actually making all this stuff acts harder to stop it being taken for free?
I'm sure nobody in Romania cares what impact file sharing has on American jobs.
I don't see why this is so wrong. Unless you want 10% of the population to be government employees watching everything that goes on, corporations HAVE to work with government to avoid breaking the law.
It's illegal in the UK for kids to walk into a store and buy alcohol. And amazingly, the checkout workers are trained to not sell it to them. I'm sure they would find their job easier if they could operate like total drones and not bother looking at the customer, or asking for ID, but they have to do so.
Pretty much everyone accepts that as a reasonable thing to do. And they have other laws to obey too, you can't even buy more than a certain amount of headache pills in one go in the UK, and if you buy a TV, the store has to inform the TV license people where you live.
This is all a case of private companies having to report or prevent illegal activity. Theres nothing unusual here. The only reason people are upset is that the people who are losing out when copyright is infringed are private companies, whereas in the cases I list above, it perceived to be the public as a whole.
I can understand an argument against draconian copyright law, and understand how you would want to lobby to change that law, but don't kid yourself that there is anything unusual or unacceptable about the government requiring private companies to assist them in enforcing the law. This is nothing new.
People who want to change copyright law should lobby politicians and vote accordingly. Just breaking the law and complaining that its too easy to get caught isn't achieving anything. Real campaigners against unjust laws WANT to get caught so they can fight their case in public.
sssshhhhh. if people realise that, they can't keep rationalising stealing music. You must be new...