Sir, after reading your comment and having cursory look at your sources, I have come to the conclusion that your "sources" are highly inaccurate. Thus I conclude that, in fact, we shouldn't check references, that we won't fall for fake for fake information or original research pulled from from one's "ass". I'm not sure about your last statement though.
It's not a nationalist thing. It's employing subtle irony to make a point. I'm quite aware that prices falling is normal across most capitalist countries. I'm also aware that the OP is aware of that point (since he made the point himself). My post was meant to make it sound like I'm trying not to be a bigot, when in truth, I know (and it seems comically obvious) that I can assume that the falling prices phenomenon would span to the OP's country (wherever that is).
OTOH, on another level, I am a little worried that these obvious assumptions may well be wrong (since my international travel experiences aren't really that impressive), so I figured the OP might add some geological context in his answer. But look at me, I'm disassembling my intentions and subtle ironies to an AC (no offence).
You're right. I don't know why the hell I typed "extortionate". Please forgive me.
However, as for the damages, triple sounds about right. Factor in that:
a) they've got a copy of the music that they didn't pay for, b) they are encouraging piracy either
i) directly, by using a P2P program and/or
ii) indirectly, by contributing to the pirate culture, and c) the RIAA is losing a lot to piracy, and so it only stands to reason that those who get caught get a bigger punishment.
As an analogy of the latter point, imagine there is a bus network that suffers from a problem with people boarding the bus without paying, and they decide to punish them by making them pay the money or get thrown off. Sure, they could do that, but they'd be losing money from all the people they didn't catch, and there'd be no deterrent, so the problem would continue indefinitely. If the RIAA just made people pay for the songs, then no-one would pay the money, and because of the relative anonymity of a P2P swarm, everyone would eventually start pirating. Does that sound like justice to you?
[The RIAA]...sues computer illiterate little old ladies who may be blind or may not have been alive at the time
Well, that doesn't sound like justice to me. It's a problem with being a private company, having to protect your bottom line, and having to protect your business. Too often, the due diligence simply isn't there. It's an unfortunate state of affairs, and the RIAA really shouldn't be so... fiscally conservative, shall we say. But also, a little of the blame belong to the pirates for forcing the RIAA's hand.
Also remember, one A. Hilter, on September 1, 1939, claimed to be a victim of Polish aggression.
Godwin should slap you. Anyone can claim being a victim, and they may well be right, but apparently that warrants a Hitler comparison.
Its funny how much we've been conditioned to think that the price of things should go up not down.
Joking aside, I don't believe I've ever been conditioned to believe that prices should go up. I know that here (in Australia), prices dropping happens a lot 'round here due to our free yet reasonably well regulated market. Not only that, we've always (*gasp*) expected prices to drop for all the reasons you stated. Where were you brought up?
They got nothin' on the NSA: "NSA's budget for electricity exceeds US$31 million per year, making it the second largest electricity consumer in the entire state of Maryland."
(emphasis mine)
Why did I just Guybrush Threepwood's voice in my head just then?
This only means one thing: the RIAA letters are extortion, plain and simple.
Piracy being such a large, widespread, and hard-to-quash problem, the RIAA can't really afford to invest big money into big suits. If they start spending large amounts of money on individual cases, and the risk of losing becomes too high, it will no longer be worth their while to sue. That would be problematic, because without their resistance to piracy, piracy itself would just snowball as people realise nothing is stopping them. They have to go for the low-lying fruit, and unfortunately, being a business, they can't afford the due diligence in preparing for such lawsuits. That's why they're leaving Harvard alone.
Because they are actively (yet messily) seeking legitimate damages from these people (guilty or not), it's not extortion. I would call the practice a lot of things (immoral, unjust, mercenary, etc), but extortionate simply isn't one of them.
But it really surprised me that she hadn't heard all of the noise we have made over the years about copyright and patent reform. We aren't speaking loud enough.
I may not be the best source for this, but out of all the non-geek people I've met and discussed politics with, and all the physical (read: not online) publications I've read, I never hear about copyright/patent reform. My experience isn't that broad, but I can certainly tell that the issue hasn't really penetrated the voter's psyche. I guess people are happy enough with the way things are now. It's not like anyone uses (or even knows how to use) their fair use rights, and paying for the latest music, movie, or software is just second nature. It's my humble, but rather regretful opinion that we are permanently going to lose most of our fair use rights, not just in the de facto "DRM the hell out of them" form now, but in a legally watertight way.
Ah, thanks for clearing that up. I really hate the Pirate Bay, and I sympathise with "Big Media", but they just keep on giving us more reasons to bay for their blood.
But the GP's definition is still fine, even if it isn't the legal definition in certain countries. In terms of morality, stealing could well be defined as taking something that isn't yours, or however else you wish to define it. In my books, it is similar to, if not exactly equal to, stealing. You are taking something that isn't yours (the copy), and depriving the copyright holder of a potential sale. When factoring in probability of a sale if piracy hadn't occurred, there is a tangible, definable loss there to the copyright holder.
But, of course, legality and morality are two different things, right? I hear that so much on anti-copyright threads...
Read the page if you haven't before. They're complete assholes. Just down the page a little, they say that Prince (or whatever he's now called) is trying to sue them. They write his name as a link to a search for the word "prince" on thepiratebay.org. They also somewhat arrogantly stated "And good luck Mr Son of a King, you probably just lost a lot of your fans" as if they knew a huge bulk of Prince fans would side with them over Prince himself. They also seem to show no remorse for the damage they are doing directly to the entertainment industry and the artists, as well as indirectly (through the messy fallout of rampant piracy) to our culture and our freedoms/privacy online.
This isn't an attack on all you Slashdotters out there who agree or sympathise with them, it's just that if legality were morality, these guys would be first against the wall.
The Pirate Bay is only legal because it claims to only host the trackers for files rather than the files themselves (I guess - IANAL BTW). It's none of their business what the torrents contains, they just supply them. If they start suing people for sabotaging the torrents, it seems they are making the torrent's contents their business. If they truly were only distributing torrent files (as opposed to copyrighted files), then they wouldn't care what happens in the swarm, whether it be normal uploads/downloads, or a hacker sabotaging it. By policing the torrents, they could well be opening them up for crippling counter-suits from copyright holders.
I've always felt that Australia has fine government transparency. I saw a link in a Slashdot post that ranked the governmental transparency over 150 countries out of 10. I can't remember the exact site, but I remember we came 7th. Not too bad, huh? Especially so when you consider that government opacity only provides potential for abuse, rather than the abuse itself.
Basically, my question is: why are you concerned about government transparency in Australia?
I'll downgrade to XP in the same way I'll "downgrade" to a first-class airline ticket or a supersized meal.
Not to pointlessly pick at your analogy, but upgrading to Vista is more like upgrading to a supersized meal. It's bigger, makes you (or at least your computer) more bloated, it's more expensive, and it builds unhealthy habits (in Vista's case, continuing the MS monopoly).:)
After reading about the flawed nature of search results and targeted advertising for identifying someone, you'd think that such hurdles would make such data next to worthless. It's like the story is trying to have its cake and eat it too. The data can either be accurate and reasonably represent the truth, or it can be faulty (like it is in the story), completely misrepresent events, and ultimately be useless to the DHS.
The Google representative in the story admitted that everyone had something to hide, and it seemed that everyone with something to hide were classified as suspect and treated like second class citizens. It seems completely implausible that a democracy would be able oppress a group that would be in the majority.
Finally, the move of Google servers to China was somehow meant to initiate the slide into "evil". It gets light on detail there, saying only that Google started censoring results, and full surveillance doesn't really seem to follow on with that. If anything, the tone of the piece seemed to be geared more towards gathering more sensitive data, rather than censoring the data accessible people.
Anyway, it's a fine read and a nice piece of government corruption fiction, but I wouldn't call it prophetic...
They're just another way of paying off running costs for web pages. They just happen to require more patience from you, which would offset potentially higher running costs. You don't have to visit the site and view them. There are plenty of alternative web sites out there that have no flash ads (or even no ads), but they may not be quite the same quality or have the same upkeep than the sites with richer sources of ad revenue. When there's so much consumer choice possibility out there, how can you imply that flash ads are evil?
... why is the parent post modded so low? I've seen very similar opinions posted here before and they've never been "flamebait"-ed/"overrated"-ed down to score:0. What did this guy do?
Slashdot Mirror
Sir, after reading your comment and having cursory look at your sources, I have come to the conclusion that your "sources" are highly inaccurate. Thus I conclude that, in fact, we shouldn't check references, that we won't fall for fake for fake information or original research pulled from from one's "ass". I'm not sure about your last statement though.
Pkease, pkease, pkease,,,,,,, use preview, and don't make me look at those hideous typos!
It wasn't meant as a joke, just as plain irony. But fair enough, I guess the phrase "joking aside" could be confusing.
It's not a nationalist thing. It's employing subtle irony to make a point. I'm quite aware that prices falling is normal across most capitalist countries. I'm also aware that the OP is aware of that point (since he made the point himself). My post was meant to make it sound like I'm trying not to be a bigot, when in truth, I know (and it seems comically obvious) that I can assume that the falling prices phenomenon would span to the OP's country (wherever that is).
OTOH, on another level, I am a little worried that these obvious assumptions may well be wrong (since my international travel experiences aren't really that impressive), so I figured the OP might add some geological context in his answer. But look at me, I'm disassembling my intentions and subtle ironies to an AC (no offence).
However, as for the damages, triple sounds about right. Factor in that:
a) they've got a copy of the music that they didn't pay for,
b) they are encouraging piracy either
i) directly, by using a P2P program and/or
ii) indirectly, by contributing to the pirate culture, and
c) the RIAA is losing a lot to piracy, and so it only stands to reason that those who get caught get a bigger punishment.
As an analogy of the latter point, imagine there is a bus network that suffers from a problem with people boarding the bus without paying, and they decide to punish them by making them pay the money or get thrown off. Sure, they could do that, but they'd be losing money from all the people they didn't catch, and there'd be no deterrent, so the problem would continue indefinitely. If the RIAA just made people pay for the songs, then no-one would pay the money, and because of the relative anonymity of a P2P swarm, everyone would eventually start pirating. Does that sound like justice to you?Well, that doesn't sound like justice to me. It's a problem with being a private company, having to protect your bottom line, and having to protect your business. Too often, the due diligence simply isn't there. It's an unfortunate state of affairs, and the RIAA really shouldn't be so... fiscally conservative, shall we say. But also, a little of the blame belong to the pirates for forcing the RIAA's hand.Godwin should slap you. Anyone can claim being a victim, and they may well be right, but apparently that warrants a Hitler comparison.
Why did I just Guybrush Threepwood's voice in my head just then?
(sarcasm noted BTW)
Because they are actively (yet messily) seeking legitimate damages from these people (guilty or not), it's not extortion. I would call the practice a lot of things (immoral, unjust, mercenary, etc), but extortionate simply isn't one of them.
Ah, thanks for clearing that up. I really hate the Pirate Bay, and I sympathise with "Big Media", but they just keep on giving us more reasons to bay for their blood.
But the GP's definition is still fine, even if it isn't the legal definition in certain countries. In terms of morality, stealing could well be defined as taking something that isn't yours, or however else you wish to define it. In my books, it is similar to, if not exactly equal to, stealing. You are taking something that isn't yours (the copy), and depriving the copyright holder of a potential sale. When factoring in probability of a sale if piracy hadn't occurred, there is a tangible, definable loss there to the copyright holder.
But, of course, legality and morality are two different things, right? I hear that so much on anti-copyright threads...
Read the page if you haven't before. They're complete assholes. Just down the page a little, they say that Prince (or whatever he's now called) is trying to sue them. They write his name as a link to a search for the word "prince" on thepiratebay.org. They also somewhat arrogantly stated "And good luck Mr Son of a King, you probably just lost a lot of your fans" as if they knew a huge bulk of Prince fans would side with them over Prince himself. They also seem to show no remorse for the damage they are doing directly to the entertainment industry and the artists, as well as indirectly (through the messy fallout of rampant piracy) to our culture and our freedoms/privacy online.
This isn't an attack on all you Slashdotters out there who agree or sympathise with them, it's just that if legality were morality, these guys would be first against the wall.
The Pirate Bay is only legal because it claims to only host the trackers for files rather than the files themselves (I guess - IANAL BTW). It's none of their business what the torrents contains, they just supply them. If they start suing people for sabotaging the torrents, it seems they are making the torrent's contents their business. If they truly were only distributing torrent files (as opposed to copyrighted files), then they wouldn't care what happens in the swarm, whether it be normal uploads/downloads, or a hacker sabotaging it. By policing the torrents, they could well be opening them up for crippling counter-suits from copyright holders.
I've always felt that Australia has fine government transparency. I saw a link in a Slashdot post that ranked the governmental transparency over 150 countries out of 10. I can't remember the exact site, but I remember we came 7th. Not too bad, huh? Especially so when you consider that government opacity only provides potential for abuse, rather than the abuse itself.
Basically, my question is: why are you concerned about government transparency in Australia?
After reading about the flawed nature of search results and targeted advertising for identifying someone, you'd think that such hurdles would make such data next to worthless. It's like the story is trying to have its cake and eat it too. The data can either be accurate and reasonably represent the truth, or it can be faulty (like it is in the story), completely misrepresent events, and ultimately be useless to the DHS.
The Google representative in the story admitted that everyone had something to hide, and it seemed that everyone with something to hide were classified as suspect and treated like second class citizens. It seems completely implausible that a democracy would be able oppress a group that would be in the majority.
Finally, the move of Google servers to China was somehow meant to initiate the slide into "evil". It gets light on detail there, saying only that Google started censoring results, and full surveillance doesn't really seem to follow on with that. If anything, the tone of the piece seemed to be geared more towards gathering more sensitive data, rather than censoring the data accessible people.
Anyway, it's a fine read and a nice piece of government corruption fiction, but I wouldn't call it prophetic...
To you it may be a tired joke, to others, it's a way of life.
They're just another way of paying off running costs for web pages. They just happen to require more patience from you, which would offset potentially higher running costs. You don't have to visit the site and view them. There are plenty of alternative web sites out there that have no flash ads (or even no ads), but they may not be quite the same quality or have the same upkeep than the sites with richer sources of ad revenue. When there's so much consumer choice possibility out there, how can you imply that flash ads are evil?
... why is the parent post modded so low? I've seen very similar opinions posted here before and they've never been "flamebait"-ed/"overrated"-ed down to score:0. What did this guy do?
(Just asking so I don't make a similar mistake)
Me too! I've always found the AI so lifelike!