I don't mind if windows verifies itself with Microsoft. Does that make me a sheep? It's an expensive product and they want to ensure people aren't pirating it. My copy is legit, so why should I resent that? I'm not sure what 'personal information' they will be getting from me, my hard drive serial number maybe? hardly my bank account details. Microsoft are no more 'treating their customers like thieves' than a store that has security tags on the clothes and a scanner by each exit. Amazingly, only the shoplifters get bent out of shape about those.
I am all in favour of restrictions to IP, fair use, format shifting and lower copyright terms. I'm not in favour of people blatantly ignoring copyright law and thinking the world owes them free entertainment, like most students seem to feel. But why bother, apparently you consider me 'not worthy of debating with'. It must be great to only 'debate' with people you agree with.
wow what bullshit. what are torrent sites doing better than itunes? oh yes I remember, they are giving away other peoples product. Well hey, i hate to break it for you, but I can out compete walmart if I get to take other peoples stuff and give it away because I have zero cost of production.
If its not yours, you didn't create it, and you didn't pay for it, and you take it without the owners permission, then its stealing. Why cant people get this into your head? I love the way someone like you would put high value on a piece of furniture, because its made by carpenters, but zero value on the fruits of a knowledge worker. Since when does the mere act of someone being able to encode a product digitally render it valueless? With that in mind, a pizza is worth more than a movie, despite th emovie costing 100,000 times as much to make. Hilarious bullshit.
But fuck it, what's the point, everyone downloading commercial music and software for free knows its unjustified, you just cling to this shared delusion that its not really hurting anyone (bullshit). So enjoy it while it lasts and before content producers give up and go work as carpenters. The same people will then whine that "nobody makes any decent movies anymore!" well *duh*.
Sorry but this in no way justifies copyright infringement. You have zero idea how markets work. markets work because of supply and demand, where (and this is the vital bit) the supply is controlled by the producer. No market survives when you stomp in and yank the product from control of its producer. How exactly can anyone compete with 'free'? Take a look at the music biz from the 1950s to the 1990s. It was BIG business, employing tens of thousands, and selling billions of dollars or product. In other words, it was a good, popular high value functioning market. Then people come along and develop a way to get the goods without paying. Suddenly "oooh the market was all wrong and the Cds were always too pricey!!!!"
bullshit. the market worked fine, the value of Cds was what people would pay for them. Supply and demand used to work fine, and thats how Cds became the price they were. nobody forced anyone to buy music.
Admit it, you are using the 'its all too expensive' argument to justify theft. if you can afford the latest iphone or ipod to play the music on, its frankly silly to say you always struggled to afford the price of a flipping CD. The CD market was not in trouble when people couldn't trivially steal music. This is obvious.
How is this a big financial bonus for the entertainment industry? The bill makes it harder for students to illegally copy their stuff fro free. If they want to make money they still have to sell the product. If people don't like they product they wont buy it. Nobody puts a gun to your head in the record store or at itunes. Its flat-out wrong to pretend that the entertainment industry *gains* from this, or from the elimination of piracy. All it does is put the playing field back where it used to be, where consumers need to pay for stuff they like, and the businesses live or die based on how well they provide products the consumers want. But hey, feel free to spin it as 'teh evil multi-millionaire mafiaaaaa' if it makes taking other peoples work for free seem right.
google do not have specifics categories for torrents like TPB does. look for fucks sake its called THE PIRATE BAY, do your eally think they are 'unaware' that 99.9% of their content is illegal? if not, why the 'hidden' servers? Its amazing the bullshit argument people will trot out to defend criminals if they think it means they can get free stuff...
Go on, keep modding me troll because you don't like hearing the truth...
a long discredited and silly argument. Google indexes everything without prejudice, and does not give out instructions deliberately on where to host copyrighted material. TPB does, and its a question of intent, in legal terms. To compare TPB with google is frankly stupid.
Indeed, welcome to slashdot. I love the way people talk about this as "censorship". These people need to read a dictionary. TPB is not being blocked because it has the writings of Karl Marx, Osama Bin Laden or Adolf Hitler. There is no political motive here. None of the games, movies, TV programs or music at TPB is being blocked, but the theft of that material is. If my local bookshop locks its doors at night and requires payment in return for the books during the day, is that censorship? But hey, this is slashdot, all content creators are 'THE EVIL RIAA' and thus worse than terrorists:(
agreed. People aren't on slashdot arguing about copyright because copyright is a problem. They are doing it because it helps them justify piracy/theft. There was no huge outcry 20 years ago about copyright terms or the penalties for infringement. In fact, I never heard anyone ever criticize anything about copyright until it became easy to download copied music and movies from the web. In short, the only thing thats changed is its easier to copy stuff now. People want stuff for free (big surprise!) so they try to justify getting it by a sudden outbreak of outrage about IP law.
I know its not exactly a serious workout, but jesus, are people too lazy to do this themselves? Frankly I enjoy getting OUT of the car and stretching my legs, its never exactly a major chore.
Insane. You think that a trade body that represents the majority of the USAs musical entertainers is as bad as a gang of violent thugs that killed and physically assaulted people. Nobody who is not part of the slashdot/digg groupthink will EVER take anything you say about copyright seriously.
have you actually ever had your legs broken by a machine-gun armed thug? because unless you have, I'm not sure you can make this comparison. Given a choice between being sued into bankruptcy or being machine-gunned to death in front of my family, I think I'm not alone in opting for the lawsuit option.
I think its tragic how people can even debate this. But hey go for it, it just makes the anti-RIAA stance look juvenile. Why don't people start comparing Record Execs to Hitler and Stalin, that's the next step right?
you did ALL the work? and here was I thinking the musicians, songwriter and recording engineer may have been SLIGHTLY involved in that... But hey, fuck them right?
Sorry to interrupt your diatribe against THE MAN, but as I recall Al Capone was a gangster, the man behind the St. Valentine's Day Massacre. And yet you would compare this with a trade body that tries to protect its revenue model and earn money from selling music? Get some fucking perspective. Yes the RIAA act like idiots and have questionable morals, but this adolescent whining that compares them to real violent criminals who kill, torture and maim people just totally discredits the entire argument, and makes people opposed to the RIAA look like dorks.
I genuinely believe that geeky kids get more upset these days by having to pay for mp3s than they do if their president lies to them in order to start a war for his self interest. get some perspective.
maybe some people (like me) are avoid gamers but aren't too upset by this. When people start talking about console games aimed at kids where you use the motion sensor controller to imitate stabbing people to death, then frankly, yes I would like to see less games like that. Any media where you are the protagonist and is interactive will have a far stronger effect on your actions than a passive media such as a book or movie. I'm sick of violent games where the hero is a flipping gang member or a drug addict. It seems that most gamers cannot get their head around the fact that you can be pro-gaming but anti-stupidly violent games or games with blatant sexual stereotyping everywhere you look.
hey anonymous coward, thanks for hurling abuse, it makes your point seem so much more intellectual. And you are apparently 'thick' as you didnt even get the point. I'll try capitals
WHY WOULD I BUY THE FRIES KNOWING I CAN COPY YOURS?
understood now?
I guess I need to clarify...
If I have no incentive to buy the fries and neither do you, neither of us will eat. We only eat if 1 of us coughs up the cash, yet the person who does so is no better off than the freeloaders. hence we all just go hungry and are *all* worse off. get it now?
so if you are copying my fries, I will just wait till you get yours and copy yours. we will both get very very hungry waiting for someone else to actually buy the fries.
oh sorry, in your wondrous new world, its dumb bastards like me that have to go out and buy the fries, presumably with my hard earned money so you can sit on your ass waiting and ready to copy them.
tell me, who gets to be in the 'we get free fries' gang, and who is forced to be the honest ones who actually pay the chip-frier to do his job?
so if you earn $150,000 a year and find the time to sit and watch a 2 hour movie, you shouldn't have to pay for it? how can you earn that amount of money yet rate your free time as being worthless? face facts, people on that salary, if they want to watch a movie can quite happily stick it on an Amazon buy list without thinking twice. Yet they begrudge spending $5 an hour for entertainment...
If you meet me for lunch and I have a side order of fries, and tell you to help yourself, that's sharing.
if I go out to work each day and work my ass off to make movies, and you go work as a plumber, and then I see you watch the movies I work at for free, yet expect me to pay you if you do some plumbing, then that isn't sharing, its called 'freeloading' or 'leeching'.
But any sensible discussion about the moral rights to other peoples hard work here is fruitless. Someone has already been modded up for using the term 'MAFIAA', so its all downhill hero-worship of TPB from here on.
indeed. what is being proposed is communism, but people on slashdot do tend to wail and moan if you point out that their proposed replacement for the copyright system they suddenly started hating the day they discovered bit-torrent is called communism. It's ironic, either you believe in a principle and will defend it, or you don't . The anti-copyright lobby want to hate capitalism and moan and whine about it, yet still enjoy the content it produces, but not partake in anything that amounts to actual effort towards paying for it.
I have respect for communists who will argue their stance, its an entirely valid POV with many good points. What I hate is hypocrites who would like communism applied to people who make the music and movies they like, but not applied to their own career or income.
agreed. this is a completely mental idea. My two beefs with it are:
a) How the fuck do you decide who gets paid what? how does the small indie band that might have been making $100 a month from their music get that $100? Who is going to argue their case and ensure they get their fair allocation? Who will be listened to in terms of changes to the allocation? will it rise with inflation? or with the amount of music listened to or downloaded?
b)Personally, I don;t download music from the web. I buy the occasional new CD (maybe 1 a year) which i listen to in my car. No fucking way should my ISP costs be used to subsidize other peoples music. Does everyone else want some extra taxes so that people who like donuts or playing golf get to avoid paying for them too?
This idea is desperate, hand-waving bullshit. Nobody in their right minds will support this.
the majority of people in the world are not regular myspace users, or instant message users or even email users. Television is probably the only truly global medium that affects everyone. You can have a huge internet phenomenon such as the 'snakes on a plane' stuff, and it doesn't mean diddly squat in terms of global reach.
The *evil* industry is also what has allowed music to become truly global. As I recall, Elvis never toured outside the US, yet he is insanely popular in Japan. Some kid in Pakistan might be a huge fan of Led Zeppelin, but I doubt they toured there. Like it or not (and I am no fan of big multinationals) global size corporations allow global reach of content. You might choose to be sniffy about this, but it's a good thing in general. My favourite band are from new York, a city I have never visited. I only heard about them because a global record company spoke to a global media company and got their first album promoted around the world. As a result I could buy their CDs (made by a huge distributor) and they could make enough sales to visit the Uk and tour. Unless you want to return to a situation where bands play locally once a month and have a nice local following but are never known elsewhere, you need companies with the ability to promote new music over a vast area.
I'm glad everyone got to hear of the Beatles, led Zeppelin, The rolling stones, Elvis and all the other acts that have become truly global. Whenever people want to find an excuse to bash the record industry they take a pop at Britney Spears et al, but the every same companies involved with teenage disposable pop also produced music from some of the most classic bands, and promoted that music around the world. If record companies collapse entirely, I'm not convinced that myspace friends lists will be as good at promoting the next Elvis to everyone who may like his music.
Slashdot Mirror
learn some manners.
I don't mind if windows verifies itself with Microsoft. Does that make me a sheep? It's an expensive product and they want to ensure people aren't pirating it. My copy is legit, so why should I resent that? I'm not sure what 'personal information' they will be getting from me, my hard drive serial number maybe? hardly my bank account details.
Microsoft are no more 'treating their customers like thieves' than a store that has security tags on the clothes and a scanner by each exit. Amazingly, only the shoplifters get bent out of shape about those.
I am all in favour of restrictions to IP, fair use, format shifting and lower copyright terms. I'm not in favour of people blatantly ignoring copyright law and thinking the world owes them free entertainment, like most students seem to feel.
But why bother, apparently you consider me 'not worthy of debating with'. It must be great to only 'debate' with people you agree with.
wow what bullshit. what are torrent sites doing better than itunes? oh yes I remember, they are giving away other peoples product. Well hey, i hate to break it for you, but I can out compete walmart if I get to take other peoples stuff and give it away because I have zero cost of production.
If its not yours, you didn't create it, and you didn't pay for it, and you take it without the owners permission, then its stealing. Why cant people get this into your head?
I love the way someone like you would put high value on a piece of furniture, because its made by carpenters, but zero value on the fruits of a knowledge worker. Since when does the mere act of someone being able to encode a product digitally render it valueless?
With that in mind, a pizza is worth more than a movie, despite th emovie costing 100,000 times as much to make. Hilarious bullshit.
But fuck it, what's the point, everyone downloading commercial music and software for free knows its unjustified, you just cling to this shared delusion that its not really hurting anyone (bullshit). So enjoy it while it lasts and before content producers give up and go work as carpenters. The same people will then whine that "nobody makes any decent movies anymore!" well *duh*.
Sorry but this in no way justifies copyright infringement. You have zero idea how markets work. markets work because of supply and demand, where (and this is the vital bit) the supply is controlled by the producer. No market survives when you stomp in and yank the product from control of its producer.
How exactly can anyone compete with 'free'?
Take a look at the music biz from the 1950s to the 1990s. It was BIG business, employing tens of thousands, and selling billions of dollars or product. In other words, it was a good, popular high value functioning market. Then people come along and develop a way to get the goods without paying.
Suddenly "oooh the market was all wrong and the Cds were always too pricey!!!!"
bullshit.
the market worked fine, the value of Cds was what people would pay for them. Supply and demand used to work fine, and thats how Cds became the price they were. nobody forced anyone to buy music.
Admit it, you are using the 'its all too expensive' argument to justify theft. if you can afford the latest iphone or ipod to play the music on, its frankly silly to say you always struggled to afford the price of a flipping CD.
The CD market was not in trouble when people couldn't trivially steal music. This is obvious.
How is this a big financial bonus for the entertainment industry?
The bill makes it harder for students to illegally copy their stuff fro free. If they want to make money they still have to sell the product. If people don't like they product they wont buy it. Nobody puts a gun to your head in the record store or at itunes.
Its flat-out wrong to pretend that the entertainment industry *gains* from this, or from the elimination of piracy. All it does is put the playing field back where it used to be, where consumers need to pay for stuff they like, and the businesses live or die based on how well they provide products the consumers want.
But hey, feel free to spin it as 'teh evil multi-millionaire mafiaaaaa' if it makes taking other peoples work for free seem right.
google do not have specifics categories for torrents like TPB does. look for fucks sake its called THE PIRATE BAY, do your eally think they are 'unaware' that 99.9% of their content is illegal? if not, why the 'hidden' servers?
Its amazing the bullshit argument people will trot out to defend criminals if they think it means they can get free stuff...
Go on, keep modding me troll because you don't like hearing the truth...
a long discredited and silly argument. Google indexes everything without prejudice, and does not give out instructions deliberately on where to host copyrighted material. TPB does, and its a question of intent, in legal terms.
To compare TPB with google is frankly stupid.
Indeed, welcome to slashdot. I love the way people talk about this as "censorship". These people need to read a dictionary. TPB is not being blocked because it has the writings of Karl Marx, Osama Bin Laden or Adolf Hitler. There is no political motive here. None of the games, movies, TV programs or music at TPB is being blocked, but the theft of that material is. :(
If my local bookshop locks its doors at night and requires payment in return for the books during the day, is that censorship?
But hey, this is slashdot, all content creators are 'THE EVIL RIAA' and thus worse than terrorists
agreed. People aren't on slashdot arguing about copyright because copyright is a problem. They are doing it because it helps them justify piracy/theft. There was no huge outcry 20 years ago about copyright terms or the penalties for infringement. In fact, I never heard anyone ever criticize anything about copyright until it became easy to download copied music and movies from the web.
In short, the only thing thats changed is its easier to copy stuff now. People want stuff for free (big surprise!) so they try to justify getting it by a sudden outbreak of outrage about IP law.
I know its not exactly a serious workout, but jesus, are people too lazy to do this themselves? Frankly I enjoy getting OUT of the car and stretching my legs, its never exactly a major chore.
Insane. You think that a trade body that represents the majority of the USAs musical entertainers is as bad as a gang of violent thugs that killed and physically assaulted people.
Nobody who is not part of the slashdot/digg groupthink will EVER take anything you say about copyright seriously.
have you actually ever had your legs broken by a machine-gun armed thug? because unless you have, I'm not sure you can make this comparison.
Given a choice between being sued into bankruptcy or being machine-gunned to death in front of my family, I think I'm not alone in opting for the lawsuit option.
I think its tragic how people can even debate this. But hey go for it, it just makes the anti-RIAA stance look juvenile. Why don't people start comparing Record Execs to Hitler and Stalin, that's the next step right?
you did ALL the work?
and here was I thinking the musicians, songwriter and recording engineer may have been SLIGHTLY involved in that...
But hey, fuck them right?
Sorry to interrupt your diatribe against THE MAN, but as I recall Al Capone was a gangster, the man behind the St. Valentine's Day Massacre. And yet you would compare this with a trade body that tries to protect its revenue model and earn money from selling music?
Get some fucking perspective. Yes the RIAA act like idiots and have questionable morals, but this adolescent whining that compares them to real violent criminals who kill, torture and maim people just totally discredits the entire argument, and makes people opposed to the RIAA look like dorks.
I genuinely believe that geeky kids get more upset these days by having to pay for mp3s than they do if their president lies to them in order to start a war for his self interest.
get some perspective.
maybe some people (like me) are avoid gamers but aren't too upset by this. When people start talking about console games aimed at kids where you use the motion sensor controller to imitate stabbing people to death, then frankly, yes I would like to see less games like that.
Any media where you are the protagonist and is interactive will have a far stronger effect on your actions than a passive media such as a book or movie.
I'm sick of violent games where the hero is a flipping gang member or a drug addict.
It seems that most gamers cannot get their head around the fact that you can be pro-gaming but anti-stupidly violent games or games with blatant sexual stereotyping everywhere you look.
hey anonymous coward, thanks for hurling abuse, it makes your point seem so much more intellectual. And you are apparently 'thick' as you didnt even get the point.
I'll try capitals
WHY WOULD I BUY THE FRIES KNOWING I CAN COPY YOURS?
understood now?
I guess I need to clarify...
If I have no incentive to buy the fries and neither do you, neither of us will eat. We only eat if 1 of us coughs up the cash, yet the person who does so is no better off than the freeloaders. hence we all just go hungry and are *all* worse off.
get it now?
so if you are copying my fries, I will just wait till you get yours and copy yours. we will both get very very hungry waiting for someone else to actually buy the fries.
oh sorry, in your wondrous new world, its dumb bastards like me that have to go out and buy the fries, presumably with my hard earned money so you can sit on your ass waiting and ready to copy them.
tell me, who gets to be in the 'we get free fries' gang, and who is forced to be the honest ones who actually pay the chip-frier to do his job?
so if you earn $150,000 a year and find the time to sit and watch a 2 hour movie, you shouldn't have to pay for it? how can you earn that amount of money yet rate your free time as being worthless?
face facts, people on that salary, if they want to watch a movie can quite happily stick it on an Amazon buy list without thinking twice. Yet they begrudge spending $5 an hour for entertainment...
Heres one of their ad providers:
http://www.adbrite.com/mb/commerce/purchase_form.php?other_product_id=186346&fg_state=search%3Dthepiratebay.org%26fq%3D71fvw%252C1uo0%257Cjvi5nk%257Cjvi5no%252C6lcck%252C1uo0%257Cjvgwme%257Cjvgwcb%26a%3D1%26fastget%3Dfg%26product_select%3Done_week%26page%3D1%26previous_selected_product%3Done_week%26check_item%3D&vertical_id=0
whats interesting is this:
Household Income
$40k-$60k 17%
$60k-75k 23%
$75k-100k 21%
$100k-150k 19%
$150k+ 18%
18% on over 150k. I think they can maybe afford to buy the DVDs don't you?
If you meet me for lunch and I have a side order of fries, and tell you to help yourself, that's sharing.
if I go out to work each day and work my ass off to make movies, and you go work as a plumber, and then I see you watch the movies I work at for free, yet expect me to pay you if you do some plumbing, then that isn't sharing, its called 'freeloading' or 'leeching'.
But any sensible discussion about the moral rights to other peoples hard work here is fruitless. Someone has already been modded up for using the term 'MAFIAA', so its all downhill hero-worship of TPB from here on.
indeed. what is being proposed is communism, but people on slashdot do tend to wail and moan if you point out that their proposed replacement for the copyright system they suddenly started hating the day they discovered bit-torrent is called communism.
It's ironic, either you believe in a principle and will defend it, or you don't . The anti-copyright lobby want to hate capitalism and moan and whine about it, yet still enjoy the content it produces, but not partake in anything that amounts to actual effort towards paying for it.
I have respect for communists who will argue their stance, its an entirely valid POV with many good points. What I hate is hypocrites who would like communism applied to people who make the music and movies they like, but not applied to their own career or income.
agreed. this is a completely mental idea. My two beefs with it are:
a) How the fuck do you decide who gets paid what? how does the small indie band that might have been making $100 a month from their music get that $100? Who is going to argue their case and ensure they get their fair allocation? Who will be listened to in terms of changes to the allocation? will it rise with inflation? or with the amount of music listened to or downloaded?
b)Personally, I don;t download music from the web. I buy the occasional new CD (maybe 1 a year) which i listen to in my car. No fucking way should my ISP costs be used to subsidize other peoples music. Does everyone else want some extra taxes so that people who like donuts or playing golf get to avoid paying for them too?
This idea is desperate, hand-waving bullshit. Nobody in their right minds will support this.
the majority of people in the world are not regular myspace users, or instant message users or even email users. Television is probably the only truly global medium that affects everyone. You can have a huge internet phenomenon such as the 'snakes on a plane' stuff, and it doesn't mean diddly squat in terms of global reach.
The *evil* industry is also what has allowed music to become truly global. As I recall, Elvis never toured outside the US, yet he is insanely popular in Japan. Some kid in Pakistan might be a huge fan of Led Zeppelin, but I doubt they toured there.
Like it or not (and I am no fan of big multinationals) global size corporations allow global reach of content. You might choose to be sniffy about this, but it's a good thing in general. My favourite band are from new York, a city I have never visited. I only heard about them because a global record company spoke to a global media company and got their first album promoted around the world. As a result I could buy their CDs (made by a huge distributor) and they could make enough sales to visit the Uk and tour.
Unless you want to return to a situation where bands play locally once a month and have a nice local following but are never known elsewhere, you need companies with the ability to promote new music over a vast area.
I'm glad everyone got to hear of the Beatles, led Zeppelin, The rolling stones, Elvis and all the other acts that have become truly global. Whenever people want to find an excuse to bash the record industry they take a pop at Britney Spears et al, but the every same companies involved with teenage disposable pop also produced music from some of the most classic bands, and promoted that music around the world. If record companies collapse entirely, I'm not convinced that myspace friends lists will be as good at promoting the next Elvis to everyone who may like his music.