I'm not surprised. Assange released a bunch of classified military documents - at a time when two wars were going on. Now, a lot of people might disagree with those wars and would, therefore, agree with Assange releasing the information. Assange, himself, has said it was his mission to end the wars - presumably, he meant that the release of classified US documents would damage the war effort so badly that the US would withdraw.
Although, I have to wonder what our response would be if this was the early 1940s, the US was fighting Germany and Japan, and a character named 'Assange' released a bunch of documents relating to the US war effort. Would this be the same thing? Would we label Assange a hero or a traitor if he was degrading the US war effort against enemies which we all hate? I wouldn't be surprised at all if a 1940s-era Assange released this information (he talks about how he'll release anything), and I wouldn't be surprised at all if the US labelled him an enemy of the state, either. I would hope that people's outrage over this didn't seem to hinge on whether or not you agree or disagree with the US war.
Never though I'd be a terrorist supporter so soon.
They didn't say Assange was a terrorist. They said he was an 'enemy of the state', a category which includes terrorists but is not synonymous with terrorism. Should I draw a Venn diagram?
I've heard in the past that FBI needs to see a $5,000 loss before they'll even consider taking on a cybercrime investigation. They've just got too many big cybercrimes to investigate to bother with small ones.
Just because you're a new player doesn't mean I'm going to give you any credit for anything. It all depends on what you're promoting. Remember: All bad political movements started out as "new players" at one time or another.
This article is horrible. It lists prices for the ASUS tablet and then concludes that Windows RT (the Operating System) is overpriced. The only relevant piece of information in this article is the fact that manufacturers have said that "in June multiple OEMs said that Microsoft was charging between $80 and $95 for a Windows RT license". Using the overall price of the tablet and then concluding that the cost of Windows RT is the reason is horrible, horrible logic. Go to the primary source and figure out how the price of Windows RT ($80-$95) differs from the price of Android.
Second, you may have noticed that "Sebatian Anthony" is the author of the article (he probably gets paid by ExtremeTech according to the number of pageviews he gets). You may have also noticed that the submitter for this article is "MrSeb" and if you follow the link it leads back to Sebastian Anthony. Yup, the article's author is the same person who submitted it to Slashdot so that he could make money. This wouldn't be so bad if the article wasn't so horribly written. Just take a look at the comments in the article (mostly negative about Sebastian's leaps of logic) and compare them to the comments on Slashdot (mostly positive, probably because Slashdot loves bad press about Microsoft). Stop getting this shitty article-writer paid.
On a side note, I happen to remember seeing Sebastian Anthony on the old (now gone) "Download Squad". He was a huge advocate of piracy and used all kinds of crappy logic to justify piracy. I'm glad to see his lack of intelligent reasoning extends to his other articles as well.
Reading the summary, I had to wonder: if the phone company only charged you for packets received, then couldn't the phone-owner game the system by instructing his phone to claim that the packet was never received? In other words, send a request for some data, receive the data and use it, and have the phone tell the company that the packets never arrived. Result: you can turn your limited data plan into an unlimited data plan. (This would obviously be an exploit similar to the DNS one, but it would use a different method to get free data.)
Copyright piracy is a VERY old legal term, and it means to make and distribute multiple copies for profit. Pirates don't share via P2P. It would defeat their whole purpose. Calling downloading "piracy" is not an example of "modern usage", it is just plain incorrect. Piracy is a crime, sometimes even a felony. Downloading is not a crime at all.
Perhaps you'd like to explain why, if piracy for no-profit is legal, that Napster and warez sites get shut down.
Also: holy crap, how did your comment get modded so high? Ah nevermind. I guess it's just pirates voting you up for saying what they want to hear, rather than saying anything accurate.
"Piracy" was used before the RIAA or the MPAA started using it. Lookup "cable piracy" - it means hooking your television into the cable-TV system without paying them. Note: you aren't getting any money from cable piracy, but it's still "piracy".
Sorry, I just had to mention that because I'm tired of people using Radiohead as an example of "pay what you want" which was wildly successful, when it really sounds like it wasn't.
"Now, here's a fresh example of how a game developer is making The Pirate Bay work for him by offering his game, McPixel, for free and letting people pay what they want."
Yeah, I saw the McPixel developer trying to get fans on Reddit too. I saw a YouTube video of the game and it isn't very good. It wasn't worth a free download. But, he seems to be doing a good job of getting out there and marketing, as well as trying to build some fame by telling pirates exactly what they want to hear.
No thanks, McPixel developer. What you're doing by validating the PirateBay is undermining the game development industry while trying to make a few extra bucks. It's fundamentally self-centered. If this ever became "the norm", then the McPixel developer wouldn't get squat as far as free-advertising from sites like Slashdot. (It actually reminds me a little bit of the stunt that S.E.Cupp (an atheist) pulled a few months ago when she went on a news show and told people she'd never vote for an atheist politician because atheists can't be trusted. She's throwing other people (other atheists) under the bus by making those kinds of arguments, but I'm sure it did a good job of getting her extra fame and sales because she's saying the opposite of what you'd expect someone to say - and playing into the hands of conservatives. I can already hear them crowing, "See, even atheists admit they can't be trusted. We need only God-fearing politicians.")
To be fair, the original statement was dramatically wrong. That statement was "Swedish government spend several hundred times more per capita". The actual number from your provided statistics is "3.44 times more per capita".
I know that Sweden gives more per capita in government aid than the US. However, claiming that it spends several hundred times more per capita immediately raised by BS detector, too. My first impulse was to verify it because I didn't believe it.
*re-reads the Second Amendment*: "A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."
Wonders where your "well regulated militia" is. Wonders why military weapons aren't all legal. Bazookas? Anti-Aircraft weapons? Tanks? Hmm. They call count as "bearing arms".
You WILL innovate, or you WILL go bankrupt. I'm not some radical pirate or communist, I'm giving you advice, trying to help you.... You're welcome.
Thank you for your insight! Perhaps you'd like to provide us with some more buzzwords? I'd like to tell creators that they need to "synergize" and "use methodologies". They're nice and vague and make creators and businesses feel like they're doing something wrong. Meanwhile, we can all pat ourselves on the back for our important and valuable contribution. If they go bankrupt, we tried to save them. It's their fault now.
More seriously, I don't believe there are any good business models outside copyright for music or movies. The solution is for people to recognize that they are doing harm with piracy. Sure, there are ad-supported services, but ads aren't providing revenue on the level that paid rentals or purchases do, and they never will. Hell, we've got the PirateBay trying to put spyware on people's computers to pay for a VPN. We'd never accept that kind of money-grabbing, consumer-harming bullshit from a media company. (Want to watch our movie for free? Here: install another spyware toolbar.) I get annoyed when people offer vague, non-workable "solutions" like "innovate". I believe the only possible outcomes are: either the number of people pirating remains low and media companies continue to survive thanks to the non-pirates, or there will be a radical reduction in revenue for movies and music. Companies will have to just have to accept the fact that their investment in music and movies will go largely unrepaid by the public who demands entertainment but is unwilling to help anybody pay the development costs. The public will have to accept the fact that music and movies will look and sound a lot cheaper (and I mean that in a negative way) and there will be fewer new movies to watch.
I'm actually not sure if piracy will lead to fewer musicians because musicians can make concert money and a lot of them will continue to delusionally believe they're going to make money *some day*, so they'll keep working like a gambling-addict in hopes that it will pay of "some day" because "it's just around the corner, I can feel it". (Meanwhile, the public will continue to feed this delusional behavior because it gets us more music.)
Why does Slashdot degrade itself by quoting Doctorow? Is he even aware of Ouya? Here's what you have to understand: Doctorow makes a career out of dystopian fiction and dystopian articles about the real world. He has figured out that anger is the most useful emotion to provoke if he wants his ideas to go viral. He's a pro-piracy crusader who fears anything that might disrupt his precious access to pirated products. He also grew up with parents who fled Russia because they were Trotskyists who were being persecuted by Lenin. Based on his history, it's not hard to see why fear and dystopia-prediction is strong with Doctorow.
Yeah, it was described as "RIAA Bailout" by TechDirt, who has a major anti-copyright agenda. TechDirt is going to use the words "RIAA Bailout" for the same reason that Republicans are going to cynically use the words "Death Panels" -- they're using whatever words they need to use in order to get people on their side.
Your summary includes the quote: "As it stands now, the rates are so damaging that Pandora — the top player in the space — has made it clear it may never be profitable. Yes, never." The link you included talks about Pandora's founder supporting a bill and opposing another one, but in that article he never says anything like "the rates are so damaging that Pandora — the top player in the space — has made it clear it may never be profitable". That quote does come from the TechDirt article without a source.
The choice they would take is quite obvious: none of the above. Just stuff more money in their pockets and keep everything as-is.
It's unfortunate for you that reality contradicts your story. I already provided ample information to prove my point: compare the investment-cost and depth of a game in 2012 to the investment-cost and depth of a game in 1985. It's funny, because people put up YouTube videos showing just how far gaming has come in the past 20 or 30 years, but people quickly forget it as soon as it contradicts a point they want to make. ( Example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3k72VoW820A )
Does anyone pay dividends anymore? I thought all stock-market gains were based on the stock price, which doesn't have anything to do with "paying out the stockholders".
I don't know. It seems like it would be trivial to watch whether or not one IP address was hitting the server with lots of different serial numbers. But, I don't know their methodology other than Brad Wardell reporting that 85% (I think) of the people trying to connect to the server were using pirated versions of the game.
If piracy went down, then game companies would have more money. This would allow them to do any of the following: reduce the price, pay their employees more, use bigger budgets to create more expensive games (which hopefully results in greater depth, quality, game-balancing, etc). Consider the depth of a $50 or $60 game in 2012 compared to the depth of a $50 or $60 game in 1985. Some of those old Atari 2600 games were created by a single person in less than a year! And, modern games are cheaper once you take inflation into account. Game companies are obviously putting a lot more investment into the games.
So remind us Ubisoft, why exactly did you create that horrible DRM?
My guess is because:
- They hope that the next DRM will work
- They hope that, even if the DRM gets broken, that they'll still have a period of time when it's not broken. Having a few months of sales with zero pirates (even if the DRM gets broken on the third month) is actually useful.
I think he is vastly overestimating his potential revenue. The # of people who install/run a pirated game (or a free game) plus the actual sales #'s does not equal the number of people who would be inclined to buy said game.
I guess I missed the part where he made that claim.
It's time like this that makes me feel like I'm Atlas, holding up the game-industry on my shoulders (because I actually pay) while so many other people don't.
It's not that hard to verify numbers. World of Goo and Demigod both reported piracy numbers in the upper 80% range, if I remember correctly. In Demigod's case, I believe they were verifying serial numbers - the game was checking in with the servers to verify their legitimate status before allowing people to play online.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not surprised. Assange released a bunch of classified military documents - at a time when two wars were going on. Now, a lot of people might disagree with those wars and would, therefore, agree with Assange releasing the information. Assange, himself, has said it was his mission to end the wars - presumably, he meant that the release of classified US documents would damage the war effort so badly that the US would withdraw.
Although, I have to wonder what our response would be if this was the early 1940s, the US was fighting Germany and Japan, and a character named 'Assange' released a bunch of documents relating to the US war effort. Would this be the same thing? Would we label Assange a hero or a traitor if he was degrading the US war effort against enemies which we all hate? I wouldn't be surprised at all if a 1940s-era Assange released this information (he talks about how he'll release anything), and I wouldn't be surprised at all if the US labelled him an enemy of the state, either. I would hope that people's outrage over this didn't seem to hinge on whether or not you agree or disagree with the US war.
Never though I'd be a terrorist supporter so soon.
They didn't say Assange was a terrorist. They said he was an 'enemy of the state', a category which includes terrorists but is not synonymous with terrorism. Should I draw a Venn diagram?
I've heard in the past that FBI needs to see a $5,000 loss before they'll even consider taking on a cybercrime investigation. They've just got too many big cybercrimes to investigate to bother with small ones.
Just because you're a new player doesn't mean I'm going to give you any credit for anything. It all depends on what you're promoting. Remember: All bad political movements started out as "new players" at one time or another.
This article is horrible. It lists prices for the ASUS tablet and then concludes that Windows RT (the Operating System) is overpriced. The only relevant piece of information in this article is the fact that manufacturers have said that "in June multiple OEMs said that Microsoft was charging between $80 and $95 for a Windows RT license". Using the overall price of the tablet and then concluding that the cost of Windows RT is the reason is horrible, horrible logic. Go to the primary source and figure out how the price of Windows RT ($80-$95) differs from the price of Android.
Second, you may have noticed that "Sebatian Anthony" is the author of the article (he probably gets paid by ExtremeTech according to the number of pageviews he gets). You may have also noticed that the submitter for this article is "MrSeb" and if you follow the link it leads back to Sebastian Anthony. Yup, the article's author is the same person who submitted it to Slashdot so that he could make money. This wouldn't be so bad if the article wasn't so horribly written. Just take a look at the comments in the article (mostly negative about Sebastian's leaps of logic) and compare them to the comments on Slashdot (mostly positive, probably because Slashdot loves bad press about Microsoft). Stop getting this shitty article-writer paid.
On a side note, I happen to remember seeing Sebastian Anthony on the old (now gone) "Download Squad". He was a huge advocate of piracy and used all kinds of crappy logic to justify piracy. I'm glad to see his lack of intelligent reasoning extends to his other articles as well.
Reading the summary, I had to wonder: if the phone company only charged you for packets received, then couldn't the phone-owner game the system by instructing his phone to claim that the packet was never received? In other words, send a request for some data, receive the data and use it, and have the phone tell the company that the packets never arrived. Result: you can turn your limited data plan into an unlimited data plan. (This would obviously be an exploit similar to the DNS one, but it would use a different method to get free data.)
Perhaps you'd like to explain why, if piracy for no-profit is legal, that Napster and warez sites get shut down.
Also: holy crap, how did your comment get modded so high? Ah nevermind. I guess it's just pirates voting you up for saying what they want to hear, rather than saying anything accurate.
Sounds like YouTube solved that problem already.
"Piracy" was used before the RIAA or the MPAA started using it. Lookup "cable piracy" - it means hooking your television into the cable-TV system without paying them. Note: you aren't getting any money from cable piracy, but it's still "piracy".
Yes, you mean that stunt that the Radiohead manager said they won't repeat again?
"Radiohead abandons ‘pay what you want’ for upcoming album release" - http://www.digitaltrends.com/music/radiohead-abandons-pay-what-you-want-for-upcoming-album-release/
"But Radiohead's manager has also said that the band likely wouldn't try a similar promotion again." - http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9894376-7.html
Sorry, I just had to mention that because I'm tired of people using Radiohead as an example of "pay what you want" which was wildly successful, when it really sounds like it wasn't.
Yeah, I saw the McPixel developer trying to get fans on Reddit too. I saw a YouTube video of the game and it isn't very good. It wasn't worth a free download. But, he seems to be doing a good job of getting out there and marketing, as well as trying to build some fame by telling pirates exactly what they want to hear.
No thanks, McPixel developer. What you're doing by validating the PirateBay is undermining the game development industry while trying to make a few extra bucks. It's fundamentally self-centered. If this ever became "the norm", then the McPixel developer wouldn't get squat as far as free-advertising from sites like Slashdot. (It actually reminds me a little bit of the stunt that S.E.Cupp (an atheist) pulled a few months ago when she went on a news show and told people she'd never vote for an atheist politician because atheists can't be trusted. She's throwing other people (other atheists) under the bus by making those kinds of arguments, but I'm sure it did a good job of getting her extra fame and sales because she's saying the opposite of what you'd expect someone to say - and playing into the hands of conservatives. I can already hear them crowing, "See, even atheists admit they can't be trusted. We need only God-fearing politicians.")
To be fair, the original statement was dramatically wrong. That statement was "Swedish government spend several hundred times more per capita". The actual number from your provided statistics is "3.44 times more per capita".
I know that Sweden gives more per capita in government aid than the US. However, claiming that it spends several hundred times more per capita immediately raised by BS detector, too. My first impulse was to verify it because I didn't believe it.
*re-reads the Second Amendment*: "A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."
Wonders where your "well regulated militia" is. Wonders why military weapons aren't all legal. Bazookas? Anti-Aircraft weapons? Tanks? Hmm. They call count as "bearing arms".
Thank you for your insight! Perhaps you'd like to provide us with some more buzzwords? I'd like to tell creators that they need to "synergize" and "use methodologies". They're nice and vague and make creators and businesses feel like they're doing something wrong. Meanwhile, we can all pat ourselves on the back for our important and valuable contribution. If they go bankrupt, we tried to save them. It's their fault now.
More seriously, I don't believe there are any good business models outside copyright for music or movies. The solution is for people to recognize that they are doing harm with piracy. Sure, there are ad-supported services, but ads aren't providing revenue on the level that paid rentals or purchases do, and they never will. Hell, we've got the PirateBay trying to put spyware on people's computers to pay for a VPN. We'd never accept that kind of money-grabbing, consumer-harming bullshit from a media company. (Want to watch our movie for free? Here: install another spyware toolbar.) I get annoyed when people offer vague, non-workable "solutions" like "innovate". I believe the only possible outcomes are: either the number of people pirating remains low and media companies continue to survive thanks to the non-pirates, or there will be a radical reduction in revenue for movies and music. Companies will have to just have to accept the fact that their investment in music and movies will go largely unrepaid by the public who demands entertainment but is unwilling to help anybody pay the development costs. The public will have to accept the fact that music and movies will look and sound a lot cheaper (and I mean that in a negative way) and there will be fewer new movies to watch.
I'm actually not sure if piracy will lead to fewer musicians because musicians can make concert money and a lot of them will continue to delusionally believe they're going to make money *some day*, so they'll keep working like a gambling-addict in hopes that it will pay of "some day" because "it's just around the corner, I can feel it". (Meanwhile, the public will continue to feed this delusional behavior because it gets us more music.)
Why does Slashdot degrade itself by quoting Doctorow? Is he even aware of Ouya? Here's what you have to understand: Doctorow makes a career out of dystopian fiction and dystopian articles about the real world. He has figured out that anger is the most useful emotion to provoke if he wants his ideas to go viral. He's a pro-piracy crusader who fears anything that might disrupt his precious access to pirated products. He also grew up with parents who fled Russia because they were Trotskyists who were being persecuted by Lenin. Based on his history, it's not hard to see why fear and dystopia-prediction is strong with Doctorow.
Yeah, it was described as "RIAA Bailout" by TechDirt, who has a major anti-copyright agenda. TechDirt is going to use the words "RIAA Bailout" for the same reason that Republicans are going to cynically use the words "Death Panels" -- they're using whatever words they need to use in order to get people on their side.
Your summary includes the quote: "As it stands now, the rates are so damaging that Pandora — the top player in the space — has made it clear it may never be profitable. Yes, never." The link you included talks about Pandora's founder supporting a bill and opposing another one, but in that article he never says anything like "the rates are so damaging that Pandora — the top player in the space — has made it clear it may never be profitable". That quote does come from the TechDirt article without a source.
It's unfortunate for you that reality contradicts your story. I already provided ample information to prove my point: compare the investment-cost and depth of a game in 2012 to the investment-cost and depth of a game in 1985. It's funny, because people put up YouTube videos showing just how far gaming has come in the past 20 or 30 years, but people quickly forget it as soon as it contradicts a point they want to make. ( Example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3k72VoW820A )
Does anyone pay dividends anymore? I thought all stock-market gains were based on the stock price, which doesn't have anything to do with "paying out the stockholders".
I don't know. It seems like it would be trivial to watch whether or not one IP address was hitting the server with lots of different serial numbers. But, I don't know their methodology other than Brad Wardell reporting that 85% (I think) of the people trying to connect to the server were using pirated versions of the game.
How do you know how they're calculating their piracy rate?
If piracy went down, then game companies would have more money. This would allow them to do any of the following: reduce the price, pay their employees more, use bigger budgets to create more expensive games (which hopefully results in greater depth, quality, game-balancing, etc). Consider the depth of a $50 or $60 game in 2012 compared to the depth of a $50 or $60 game in 1985. Some of those old Atari 2600 games were created by a single person in less than a year! And, modern games are cheaper once you take inflation into account. Game companies are obviously putting a lot more investment into the games.
My guess is because:
- They hope that the next DRM will work
- They hope that, even if the DRM gets broken, that they'll still have a period of time when it's not broken. Having a few months of sales with zero pirates (even if the DRM gets broken on the third month) is actually useful.
I guess I missed the part where he made that claim.
It's time like this that makes me feel like I'm Atlas, holding up the game-industry on my shoulders (because I actually pay) while so many other people don't.
It's not that hard to verify numbers. World of Goo and Demigod both reported piracy numbers in the upper 80% range, if I remember correctly. In Demigod's case, I believe they were verifying serial numbers - the game was checking in with the servers to verify their legitimate status before allowing people to play online.