oh dear... The builder knows 100% that he will get paid for his work, and his work is paid accordingly. The musician knows that 99% of the music he writes wont sell any copies and he will get nowhere. This is balanced out by his dream that in that 1% he will write something popular enough to recoup the losses of the other 99% of the time. You sound like you are jealous of people who write a hit album and seem to be making a fortune. Do you think you were jealous of them for the 15 years before they became an overnight success when they earned sod all while you had your nice regular builders salary?
There is no government permit required for you to write songs. If it's such a gravy train to just bash out a hit single and relax on your private island, why aren't you doing it? It's a free market, nobody is going to stop you.
I don't side with the riaa or the mpaa, they are both maniacs and idiots I support many of the criticisms of both groups. But I don't believe that piracy is justified. This is one of my main points. You can be against piracy and still be against the RIAA and MPAA. People love to lump all content providers together as evil, because it makes it easier to justify piracy that way. I could easily post anonymously, but I think a post that points out the problems of piracy has more weight if its clearly from a content producer. Maybe it's bad PR for me, but I think it's an important point of principle, and one I'm not ashamed of stating openly. I'm not 'siding with the man'. That sounds like the whole 'if you're not with us you're against us' argument. There are more shades to the debate than just "lets sue everyone and impose rootkit drm" and "all content should be free man!".
aha, so by taking a small struggling bands music for free, you are actually providing a public service? If something has a price tag, its wrong to take it for free. If the band is more interested in 'getting the word out' they can make the album free, or they can ask for donations. both are valid decisions, as are charging for their music. But if they DO charge, and people take it anyway, you are basically saying to the band that you don't care what it is they want, you are going to take that decision out of their hands... just because you can. My fave band is probably heavily pirated, but I always order the CD the minute its released. Why would I try and rip off the very musicians I most admire? The are also very successful and don't need more money, but they have earned every cent of it, and good luck to them.
fuck big business. Anyone can set up a website NOW and sell anything they want NOW at any price. I KNOW this because that is exactly what I do. And the one group in society that makes this hard is the people who pirate the stuff. Seriously, I get no grief from big business at all. nobody stops me doing the little company thing. the biggest problem I have is people who take the stuff for free. ironically in the name of 'sticking it to teh man'.
Stop trying to turn this into a 'poor fileshareers vs evil big business' debate. You advocate the little guy making his own content and making a living from it right? So why the fuck is it still ok to steal the content made by the little guy? How many torrent sites check each submission and go "heck this is a small, customer-friendly and innovative small business, methinks we should not torrent their content".
If you REALLY wanted to get back at the RIAA you would BUY music direct from non-RIAA artists. the same goes for games, movies etc etc. But I'm guessing like 99% of anti-RIAA campaigners, your 'solution' is to just still consume the same content made by the big businesses you hate, but to steal it. You are changing *nothing* by doing that. You will NEVER change a market to which you have made yourself invisible.
forget your fantasies about the RIAA and MPAA. I am doing the exact thing you outline in the constitutional model. So you support 100% the way I work right? except increasingly people do not support the constitutional model, they just take everything for free and stick two fingers up at anyone dumb enough to make any new content. take a look at the asshole who also replied to my post to stick the knife in to see what I mean. Despite having a free demo, he insisted on stealing my stuff just so he could slag me off on teh interweb.
filesharers treat the content producers like scum. We are all branded as MPAA-MAFIAAAAAA regardless of what we do or who we are. I don't use DRM, I have free demos, no adverts, no adware, spyware or rootkits, and my stuff is pirated just as much as the next guy. In other words I have ZERO incentive to act ANY differently to 'teh evil mafiaaaaaa'. The actions of people pirating stuff just drives every content provider to act like the worst of them. This is obvious.
"I assume that you pay royalties on Happy Birthday."
*sigh*. where have I said that I support that crap? I support artists being paid for their work and not having their content pirated. I also support format shifting, backups and fair use, and limited copyright terms. Yet you acted like a typical pro-piracy kid in slagging me off like an evil MPAA stooge just because I dared suggest that pirating stuff is wrong. In short, its the attitude of hardcore pro-piracy people like you that mean the MPAA nd RIAA will never change their minds, and in fact have zero incentive to do so.
all my games have free demos which I encourage people to make use of. but like the typical arrogant file sharer, you just stole them anyway. what an asshole, and cheers for making my point for me about the attitude of people like you.
Ever wondered why you don't like the games people make? its because you never encourage anyone to make any, because you just steal them. In commercial terms, you are invisible, and so are your needs and desires. Think about it.
bullshit. the internet lets you break the RIAA monopoly easily. here you go:
1)record music 2)put music for sale on website 3)profit!
but the file sharing crowd would rather do this:
1)copy someone else's music!
Thats where it goes wrong. ironically, the same people who bitch about torrent ratios and 'leeches' and people 'not saying thanks' on forums sharing copyrighted files, do not realise they are the ultimate leeches, the people who take commercially produced content for free and give NOTHING back.
There is no longer a monopoly on content. anyone can make it. I myself make PC games and bypass the retail market altogether. I'm dong what the web has enabled the little guy to do, to compete against the big guys. But most people can't be bothered to actually make content. they bitch about the content other people make, but their protest is basically to steal other peoples stuff, not to make anything different. There is nothing obsolete about the business model of making stuff and selling it. Wal Mart does this every day. Why a special set of rules for stuff online? admit it, its because you like to leech free stuff and are seeking for some dubious justification for it. If you really think that content should all be free, then that's communism. but that means you need to work your eight hours a day for free too. Happy with that?
I see. which ones? the ones that let you download copyrighted content for free? or all laws regarding payment for goods and services? and why be in favour of one and not the other. please explain the reasoning behind this to me.
hold on, that woman who got a 220k fine was not arguing the legality of fair use, she was caught red handed having used p2p programs to download and distribute a ton of music she didn't pay for. At least admit when a pirate gets caught trying to leech free stuff. don't pretend she was some hero fighting for the cause. This wasn't a test case bought by anti-copyright campaigners, just a woman infringing copyright who got caught.
actually the reason that britney and the backstreet boys are on TV and you don't like them is that they sell records. If you pirate music, you are invisible to the market, and your purchasing decision doesn't register. The record execs don't sign bands that they think people like, the sign bands that make money. You could have some cool indie band that was massively popular amongst the slashdot reading demographic, but they will never get a record deal or national tour sponsored, because they do not generate money. Removing yourself from the marketplace for music means losing any influence whatsoever on the supply side decisions. Money talks.
aren't ALL business models only viable if the law is obeyed? Like the law that says you have to pay for stuff on the shelves of wal-mart. Is the retail business model outdated because ultimately it requires police officers to enforce it? Your argument makes zero sense. Unless you advocate anarchy where all laws are ignored?
telephone calls are easily traced after the event. The anon nature ( to an extent) of a lot of internet traffic means that its a different kettle of fish. Plus the economic damage caused by mass distribution of copyrighted material dwarfs the relatively minor amount of crime that is facilitated by telephones. Its a different scenario, and needs handling differently. if you think that the current situation, where companies invest tens of millions in movies which get stolen instantly, will persist, you are dreaming.
Yes. I am in a political party, I contribute to that party, and I deliver campaign literature for that party. I also am an active member of a political pressure group and often write to Members of parliament to tell them what i think. This doesn't achieve a lot, but it achieves more than my vote. Plus it's all good experience for making this -> www.democracygame.com
living in a democracy IS a privilege, but as I live under a proportional representation system in a safe tory seat in the UK, where big party donations get you a seat for life in the house of lords, I don't appear to live in one.
why on earth would you build big solar farms to take up land use? there is plenty of room on the tops of existing buildings, where you can use the power right at the point where it is generated, with zero transmission line losses. Don't pretend that an argument against solar power is it uses up land, because that's nonsense. solar fits in well around the way our cities are already designed. And wind power can make dual use of land where animals graze. Many UK wind farms are also doubling up as farmland.
Hi. I'm an environmentalist opposed to nuclear power. re-read your post, with its insults, vitriol and sarcasm, and ask yourself while you are completely incapable of changing peoples minds...
that's because coal deaths are spread out. nuclear accident deaths are sudden events. The number of deaths due to planes hitting skyscrapers was pretty negligible until 2001. Then for some sudden reason the stats jumped.
Coal plants don't give Chernobyl style disasters. the fact that its been a long time since a Chernobyl disaster does not mean it can never happen. whenever people tell me that US reactors are 100% incapable of having such problems, I'm reminded of the assurances that the twin towers were designed to withstand a plane hitting them. As it happens, that didn't work, and thousands of people died. In the UK, the nuclear industry has been caught lying through its teeth on pretty much every topic. they are not trusted, and with good reason.
I think the chances of another chernobyl are very very low myself, but concerns about nuclear waste, proliferation, and the insane cost and huge history of UK govt subsidies to nuclear, combined with the fact that we waste a stupid proportion of our energy at the moment, means I'm still opposed to new nuclear.
When we start seeing some vague concern about fuel efficiency in domestic appliances and new building design as a matter of routine, I'll accept that we have done what we need to do and might have to look at undesirable energy sources. This is not yet the case.
surely that only works once though? player A can only cry wolf once before he loses credibility? personally, I'm so sick of software piracy that I don't really care if it represents infighting in the russian corporate elite. as long as they do something about the blatmnt software piracy from that country. many big companies i know who sell online entirely blacklist the country by IP because of the extent of fraud and piracy from there.
wtf is so hard about not pirating stuff? its not like piarted software jumps through your chimney while you sleep for fucks sake. And its not that 'anyone' can be prosecuted for marijuana laws either. Try prosecuting me, I've never touched the stuff. don't extrapolate to 'everyone' from your group of friends.
don't try and water down piracy as 'a mate emailed me an mp3 and I didn't delete it'. That's bullshit. the problem the MPAA and RIAA have with universities is kids running bittorrent clients 24/7 downloading thousands of songs and movies. To pretend its some evil persecution of poor innocent kids being sent emails is just embarrassing bullshit and shows that the majority of people who defend filesharing are just in total denial. If students are so worried about funding, has it ever occurred to them that maybe they should be studying, rather than spending all their time downloading copyrighted content?
Go on, mod me down because I don't believe the slashdot group think crap about copyright being evil.
so you think students should choose a university based on which one will help cover their asses the most once they get caught downloading copyrighted material? wow. Personally, I'd rather employ someone who had realized university and college was about study, rather than maxing out your ipod with songs you haven't paid for. I think most employers feel the same way.
why do you assume everyone hurt by illegal filesharing is rich? does everyone at a software company who gets laid off because everyone pirated the product instead of buying it, automatically become 'rich' and 'evil' and 'corrupt' because they happen to work in an industry that produces digital content?
This bullshit that filesharing only hurts millionaires is complete and utter nonsense. It hurts everyone in an industry that produces anything that can be encoded digitally. Thats a lot of people, many of them on low wages.
Slashdot Mirror
oh dear...
The builder knows 100% that he will get paid for his work, and his work is paid accordingly. The musician knows that 99% of the music he writes wont sell any copies and he will get nowhere. This is balanced out by his dream that in that 1% he will write something popular enough to recoup the losses of the other 99% of the time.
You sound like you are jealous of people who write a hit album and seem to be making a fortune. Do you think you were jealous of them for the 15 years before they became an overnight success when they earned sod all while you had your nice regular builders salary?
There is no government permit required for you to write songs. If it's such a gravy train to just bash out a hit single and relax on your private island, why aren't you doing it? It's a free market, nobody is going to stop you.
I don't side with the riaa or the mpaa, they are both maniacs and idiots I support many of the criticisms of both groups.
But I don't believe that piracy is justified.
This is one of my main points. You can be against piracy and still be against the RIAA and MPAA. People love to lump all content providers together as evil, because it makes it easier to justify piracy that way.
I could easily post anonymously, but I think a post that points out the problems of piracy has more weight if its clearly from a content producer. Maybe it's bad PR for me, but I think it's an important point of principle, and one I'm not ashamed of stating openly.
I'm not 'siding with the man'. That sounds like the whole 'if you're not with us you're against us' argument. There are more shades to the debate than just "lets sue everyone and impose rootkit drm" and "all content should be free man!".
aha, so by taking a small struggling bands music for free, you are actually providing a public service?
If something has a price tag, its wrong to take it for free. If the band is more interested in 'getting the word out' they can make the album free, or they can ask for donations. both are valid decisions, as are charging for their music. But if they DO charge, and people take it anyway, you are basically saying to the band that you don't care what it is they want, you are going to take that decision out of their hands... just because you can.
My fave band is probably heavily pirated, but I always order the CD the minute its released. Why would I try and rip off the very musicians I most admire? The are also very successful and don't need more money, but they have earned every cent of it, and good luck to them.
fuck big business. Anyone can set up a website NOW and sell anything they want NOW at any price. I KNOW this because that is exactly what I do. And the one group in society that makes this hard is the people who pirate the stuff. Seriously, I get no grief from big business at all. nobody stops me doing the little company thing. the biggest problem I have is people who take the stuff for free. ironically in the name of 'sticking it to teh man'.
Stop trying to turn this into a 'poor fileshareers vs evil big business' debate. You advocate the little guy making his own content and making a living from it right? So why the fuck is it still ok to steal the content made by the little guy? How many torrent sites check each submission and go "heck this is a small, customer-friendly and innovative small business, methinks we should not torrent their content".
If you REALLY wanted to get back at the RIAA you would BUY music direct from non-RIAA artists. the same goes for games, movies etc etc. But I'm guessing like 99% of anti-RIAA campaigners, your 'solution' is to just still consume the same content made by the big businesses you hate, but to steal it.
You are changing *nothing* by doing that. You will NEVER change a market to which you have made yourself invisible.
forget your fantasies about the RIAA and MPAA. I am doing the exact thing you outline in the constitutional model. So you support 100% the way I work right?
except increasingly people do not support the constitutional model, they just take everything for free and stick two fingers up at anyone dumb enough to make any new content. take a look at the asshole who also replied to my post to stick the knife in to see what I mean. Despite having a free demo, he insisted on stealing my stuff just so he could slag me off on teh interweb.
filesharers treat the content producers like scum. We are all branded as MPAA-MAFIAAAAAA regardless of what we do or who we are. I don't use DRM, I have free demos, no adverts, no adware, spyware or rootkits, and my stuff is pirated just as much as the next guy. In other words I have ZERO incentive to act ANY differently to 'teh evil mafiaaaaaa'. The actions of people pirating stuff just drives every content provider to act like the worst of them. This is obvious.
"I assume that you pay royalties on Happy Birthday."
*sigh*. where have I said that I support that crap? I support artists being paid for their work and not having their content pirated. I also support format shifting, backups and fair use, and limited copyright terms. Yet you acted like a typical pro-piracy kid in slagging me off like an evil MPAA stooge just because I dared suggest that pirating stuff is wrong.
In short, its the attitude of hardcore pro-piracy people like you that mean the MPAA nd RIAA will never change their minds, and in fact have zero incentive to do so.
all my games have free demos which I encourage people to make use of. but like the typical arrogant file sharer, you just stole them anyway. what an asshole, and cheers for making my point for me about the attitude of people like you.
Ever wondered why you don't like the games people make? its because you never encourage anyone to make any, because you just steal them. In commercial terms, you are invisible, and so are your needs and desires.
Think about it.
bullshit.
the internet lets you break the RIAA monopoly easily. here you go:
1)record music
2)put music for sale on website
3)profit!
but the file sharing crowd would rather do this:
1)copy someone else's music!
Thats where it goes wrong. ironically, the same people who bitch about torrent ratios and 'leeches' and people 'not saying thanks' on forums sharing copyrighted files, do not realise they are the ultimate leeches, the people who take commercially produced content for free and give NOTHING back.
There is no longer a monopoly on content. anyone can make it. I myself make PC games and bypass the retail market altogether. I'm dong what the web has enabled the little guy to do, to compete against the big guys. But most people can't be bothered to actually make content. they bitch about the content other people make, but their protest is basically to steal other peoples stuff, not to make anything different.
There is nothing obsolete about the business model of making stuff and selling it. Wal Mart does this every day. Why a special set of rules for stuff online? admit it, its because you like to leech free stuff and are seeking for some dubious justification for it.
If you really think that content should all be free, then that's communism. but that means you need to work your eight hours a day for free too. Happy with that?
I see. which ones? the ones that let you download copyrighted content for free? or all laws regarding payment for goods and services? and why be in favour of one and not the other. please explain the reasoning behind this to me.
hold on, that woman who got a 220k fine was not arguing the legality of fair use, she was caught red handed having used p2p programs to download and distribute a ton of music she didn't pay for. At least admit when a pirate gets caught trying to leech free stuff. don't pretend she was some hero fighting for the cause. This wasn't a test case bought by anti-copyright campaigners, just a woman infringing copyright who got caught.
ah an abusive retort from an anoynmous coward, typical of the piracy-justifying crowd.
actually the reason that britney and the backstreet boys are on TV and you don't like them is that they sell records. If you pirate music, you are invisible to the market, and your purchasing decision doesn't register. The record execs don't sign bands that they think people like, the sign bands that make money.
You could have some cool indie band that was massively popular amongst the slashdot reading demographic, but they will never get a record deal or national tour sponsored, because they do not generate money.
Removing yourself from the marketplace for music means losing any influence whatsoever on the supply side decisions. Money talks.
aren't ALL business models only viable if the law is obeyed? Like the law that says you have to pay for stuff on the shelves of wal-mart. Is the retail business model outdated because ultimately it requires police officers to enforce it?
Your argument makes zero sense. Unless you advocate anarchy where all laws are ignored?
telephone calls are easily traced after the event. The anon nature ( to an extent) of a lot of internet traffic means that its a different kettle of fish. Plus the economic damage caused by mass distribution of copyrighted material dwarfs the relatively minor amount of crime that is facilitated by telephones.
Its a different scenario, and needs handling differently. if you think that the current situation, where companies invest tens of millions in movies which get stolen instantly, will persist, you are dreaming.
gah! that's what I meant :(
Yes. I am in a political party, I contribute to that party, and I deliver campaign literature for that party. I also am an active member of a political pressure group and often write to Members of parliament to tell them what i think.
This doesn't achieve a lot, but it achieves more than my vote.
Plus it's all good experience for making this -> www.democracygame.com
living in a democracy IS a privilege, but as I live under a proportional representation system in a safe tory seat in the UK, where big party donations get you a seat for life in the house of lords, I don't appear to live in one.
why on earth would you build big solar farms to take up land use? there is plenty of room on the tops of existing buildings, where you can use the power right at the point where it is generated, with zero transmission line losses.
Don't pretend that an argument against solar power is it uses up land, because that's nonsense. solar fits in well around the way our cities are already designed. And wind power can make dual use of land where animals graze. Many UK wind farms are also doubling up as farmland.
Hi. I'm an environmentalist opposed to nuclear power. re-read your post, with its insults, vitriol and sarcasm, and ask yourself while you are completely incapable of changing peoples minds...
that's because coal deaths are spread out. nuclear accident deaths are sudden events. The number of deaths due to planes hitting skyscrapers was pretty negligible until 2001. Then for some sudden reason the stats jumped.
Coal plants don't give Chernobyl style disasters. the fact that its been a long time since a Chernobyl disaster does not mean it can never happen. whenever people tell me that US reactors are 100% incapable of having such problems, I'm reminded of the assurances that the twin towers were designed to withstand a plane hitting them. As it happens, that didn't work, and thousands of people died. In the UK, the nuclear industry has been caught lying through its teeth on pretty much every topic. they are not trusted, and with good reason.
I think the chances of another chernobyl are very very low myself, but concerns about nuclear waste, proliferation, and the insane cost and huge history of UK govt subsidies to nuclear, combined with the fact that we waste a stupid proportion of our energy at the moment, means I'm still opposed to new nuclear.
When we start seeing some vague concern about fuel efficiency in domestic appliances and new building design as a matter of routine, I'll accept that we have done what we need to do and might have to look at undesirable energy sources. This is not yet the case.
multiplayer works flawlessly on the pc, just played for the last hour.
surely that only works once though? player A can only cry wolf once before he loses credibility?
personally, I'm so sick of software piracy that I don't really care if it represents infighting in the russian corporate elite. as long as they do something about the blatmnt software piracy from that country. many big companies i know who sell online entirely blacklist the country by IP because of the extent of fraud and piracy from there.
wtf is so hard about not pirating stuff? its not like piarted software jumps through your chimney while you sleep for fucks sake. And its not that 'anyone' can be prosecuted for marijuana laws either. Try prosecuting me, I've never touched the stuff. don't extrapolate to 'everyone' from your group of friends.
don't try and water down piracy as 'a mate emailed me an mp3 and I didn't delete it'. That's bullshit. the problem the MPAA and RIAA have with universities is kids running bittorrent clients 24/7 downloading thousands of songs and movies. To pretend its some evil persecution of poor innocent kids being sent emails is just embarrassing bullshit and shows that the majority of people who defend filesharing are just in total denial.
If students are so worried about funding, has it ever occurred to them that maybe they should be studying, rather than spending all their time downloading copyrighted content?
Go on, mod me down because I don't believe the slashdot group think crap about copyright being evil.
so you think students should choose a university based on which one will help cover their asses the most once they get caught downloading copyrighted material?
wow. Personally, I'd rather employ someone who had realized university and college was about study, rather than maxing out your ipod with songs you haven't paid for. I think most employers feel the same way.
why do you assume everyone hurt by illegal filesharing is rich? does everyone at a software company who gets laid off because everyone pirated the product instead of buying it, automatically become 'rich' and 'evil' and 'corrupt' because they happen to work in an industry that produces digital content?
This bullshit that filesharing only hurts millionaires is complete and utter nonsense. It hurts everyone in an industry that produces anything that can be encoded digitally. Thats a lot of people, many of them on low wages.