I never said IP was free to produced. My argument is the once IP has been produced, an infinite amount of the same piece of IP can produced at zero cost. There's a huge investment in the first copy, but subsequent copies can be produced without additional cost. Making 1 copy of a program or 1,000,000 copies cost virtually the same. New business models needs to be developed to fit the changes in society. Companies like RIOT and Nexon might be onto something. Their model of a free basic app but having to pay for enhancements might be the way to go.

I want to make something clear, I'm not defending piracy. It is something wrong and needs to be eliminated. I am however attacking our current philosophy of dealing with piracy. Attacking it using technical measures such as DRM, and legislating it is not the answer. The solution to piracy is to make piracy obsolete. Companies need to find new business models that don't rely on selling multiple copies of the same thing. Trying to directly attack the pirates via technological measures is ineffective since you only need ONE person to crack the protection. Attacking via legislation is also ineffective because there's too many pirates, we can't thrown everyone who downloaded an MP3 in jail.

LOL.

Thanks bro, I've been seeing that trend for a while now :D

Nah, but the Feds' agenda is made by the Jewish Zionists, that's for sure. If Anonymous are the Feds, then they are doing this to try and show the sheeple that an act like this would make SOPA/PIPA valid.

I just find it hilarious that people can find a way to justify breaking the law using semantics and fringe logic. Most people who pirate content have no idea how much work goes into building a software product, producing a movie, publishing a novel, or distributing an album. Because they have no perspective on that it is easy to minimize the impact of their actions in their own minds. As a software professional and musician I know first hand how much work it is to do those things, so I pay for what I use, deal with the fact that I can't have everything, and refuse to illegally download pirated material.


Do you thjink sites like Megaupload and Pirate Bay operate out of some holistic principal for the good of society? If you do you are naive. They make millions of dollars selling advertising and user data. You downloading pirated software and content absolutely does contribute to perpetuating piracy that hurts the industry that produces those products. Saying that just because you did not have the money to buy it in the first place means that stealing it does not hurt anyone is a ridiculous and self serving argument.


This is a ludicrous example as it is only partially true for software, but only partially and specifically it only really applies to online gaming and support. For pirated offline games and commercial software witholding support for pirated copies is useless. Patches and updates are just as easily pirated and third party support sites offer just as much if not more information about a product than most software companies can reasonably produce. For movies, books, music there is no reasonable way to block pirated content from being used. For the vast majority of pirated content the digital copy is EXACTLY the same regardless of the user.

I would never defend SOPA. It is a poorly written, one sided, and disastrous piece of legislation written by technically illetarate old men most of whom have no idea how to even turn a computer on. Piracy can only be stopped by direct action through unbiased enforcement of the law. That is a process that must be executed with respect to our individual freedoms and liberties, but NOBODY has the right to break the law just because it is easy to do. The only way to stop piracy is to stop fighting the useless war on drugs and repurpose the DEA to target online piracy sites, distributors of illegally copied material, and abusers.

I expect the police to arrest a guy that steals $50 from a liquor store, downloading thousands of dollars worth of pirated software and media is no different. Breaking the law is breaking the law no matter how thick the rose colored glasses are or what kind of spin you want to put on it. Life is not fair. Not everything is free, and until we live in some kind of utopian society people need to pay for their shit or suffer the consequences.

BTW - You mentioned Mozilla "making" over $100M per year. The reality is their total REVENUE for 2011 was $79M. REVENUE != PROFIT. I know the former VP Engineering at Mozilla personally, he just bailed out to go to Jive (pure commercial play) because they were struggling to stay above water. There are only 3 open source companies that have made it to profitable liquidation events to date. Those three are JBoss, Redhat, and MySQL. 2 of those three were acquired by public companies and one had a successful IPO. Other than that pure OSS is a misguided business plan only popular to users who want free shit. Open Core is the latest fad for commercial open source software, and the jury is still out on that model. Open Core provides commodity features in a freemium offering and restricts value features to people who pay the license fee.

I find it hilarious that you ignore the two basic points of my argument and instead repeat how much work goes into producing content. You just sound really mad. I would be really mad too if people were getting my work for free. But for the tl;dr population, I will ask/say again:

1. Assuming I am unable to afford a digital item on my budget, how does my individual act of piracy hurt a creator?
2. Do you think you will convince the global network of piracy to abandon ship (har) with your rhetoric about morals/ethics? Even IF I am wrong about point #1, that’s not a solution. As unfair as it is, a growing number of people are getting a growing expertise in piracy. Hollering ain’t stopping that; creators are going to have to do something else or lose their jobs. See the handful of examples I provided last time that you all but ignored for some ideas from an industry outsider like myself; I bet yall can do even better.


I didn’t say anything about anyone operating out of holistic principals. Not having the money to buy a digital item does, in fact, mean that stealing it does not hurt anyone, as self-serving as it may be. Maybe you have an interesting point that using a website to pirate means the pirates are getting ad revenue, but that’s only assuming that’s how I pirate. Who is getting hurt if I make a copy of a friend’s game/software/music (remember, one that I can’t afford)?


Well I have to admit I don’t know anyone at Mozilla . That being said, I do know they just extended their deal with google and are getting paid $300M annually (through at least 2014) just from that. Maybe we’re at a collaborative stage where profit isn’t all that relevant anymore. Revenue allows them to operate and pay their developers and put out a great product.


I couldn’t agree more. Which is why you and other developers are going to have to face the harsh reality that there are now more and more people with the technical skills to pirate your products, and you are therefore going to have to face some way to adapt your industry or you are, morality aside, going to be out of business very soon.

I don't think my arguments or yours are going to convince anyone to switch sides on this debate. Feel free to answer but I think I've said more or less what I can, so I'm done after this. And really, I do understand where you're coming from. That's why I've stopped pirating (except for one hypothetical act in the past 3 years); because I know that unless it's really something I would never buy otherwise then it's financially equivalent to theft. For what it's worth (little, I'm sure), I sincerely hope that the industry does come up with a good answer that doesn't involve draconian measures. Yall shouldn't have to change the way you work in order to combat the bad behavior of others, but unfortunately that's today's reality. Good luck...

I guess you did not read my response very thoroughly because I addressed both of those points as well as debunking other statements you made about how copied software does not differ between users. Read it again if you want, I am not into repeating myself. Maybe read the whole post before responding to the first sentence.

Copying a DVD or a game from a friend is just noise in the piracy game. If that's all people do then I say big whoop...someone in an individual's social circle close enough to allow that to be done had to buy the product, and that's fine. The big beef industry has with piracy is the massive online sharing of copyrighted product. Copying a friend's DVD is like jaywalking...sure its illegal but give me a break.

The Google/Mozilla deal you mentioned is not as clean as it seems at first glance. $300M annual is a best case estimate of the percentage of ad revenues that will be received by Mozilla as a revenue share for driving traffic by keeping Google as the default search provider for the browser. It hinges upon Mozilla maintaining market share and users not disabling browser bar search or changing their default provider, and it is calculated using an unrealistic assumption that 100% of Mozilla users will keep the default search provider. Mozilla market share is eroding, Chrome is gaining ground and IE is holding steady. Mobile browsers are becoming more prevalent, and that number is not likely to be anywhere near $300M when all is said and done but it sure makes for good press. Neither Google nor Mozilla were willing to comment on the actual terms of that deal.

Shredder, I don't get you insistence of linking piracy with stealing.

Piracy is a new form of crime that isn't well characterized yet, but it is most definitely NOT stealing.

The legal definition of steal is:
STEAL
the wrongful or willful taking of money or property belonging to someone else with intent to deprive the owner of its use or benefit either temporarily or permanently. No particular type of movement or carrying away is required.

If I have stolen something from you, you no longer have it. Piracy doesn't deprive the victims of the crime their property. Piracy only infringes on your exclusive rights to sell your IP. Calling piracy stealing is simply a PR campaign from the industry.

you guys can stop the fighting, the bill isn't meant to stop piracy its meant to turn the internet into TV so they can controll it, it has nothing to do with stopping bootleggers and what not, its a bad bill and nobody owns the internet, please stop letting the globalists win by arguing about a bill that limits free speech and promotes censorship that THEY have the ability to controll and decide what we see and do online, trust me ITS BAD its not good and it wont protect and secure anything ever.

Well not to be a jerk, because I'm on your side of things here generally, but theft (or larceny, etc) as a criminal offence is defined in the criminal codes of the 50 states. So the legal definition varies.


But that's just as unrelated to the topic of the thread as our little spat was!

Your definition is relevant to piracy. Piracy deprives the owner of the benefit of the product downloaded by eliminating the opportunity to license the product. There really is no justification or rationalization, any argument suggesting people have a right to acquire pirated copyrighted materials is absolutely ridiculous.

Some other definitions:

THEFT
the generic term for all crimes in which a person intentionally and fraudulently takes personal property of another without permission or consent and with the intent to convert it to the taker's use (including potential sale).

steal (stl)
v. stole (stl), sto·len (stln), steal·ing, steals
v.tr.
1. To take (the property of another) without right or permission.
2. To present or use (someone else's words or ideas) as one's own.
3. To get or take secretly or artfully: steal a look at a diary; steal the puck from an opponent.
4. To give or enjoy (a kiss) that is unexpected or unnoticed.
5. To draw attention unexpectedly in (an entertainment), especially by being the outstanding performer: The magician's assistant stole the show with her comic antics.
6. Baseball To advance safely to (another base) during the delivery of a pitch, without the aid of a base hit, walk, passed ball, or wild pitch.
v.intr.
1. To commit theft.
2. To move, happen, or elapse stealthily or unobtrusively.
3. Baseball To steal a base.
n.
1. The act of stealing.
2. Slang A bargain.
3. Baseball A stolen base.
4. Basketball An act of gaining possession of the ball from an opponent.
5. To use, appropriate, or preempt the use of another's idea, especially to one's own advantage and without consent by the originator.

I'm gonna side with Shredder in his being right that piracy is basically stealing. The phenomenon of piracy just points out the fact that with digital goods, there is an infinite source of a good simply by virtue of you make one copy, you make infinite copies. Now, because of the invalidity of the scarcity model in digital goods, a different model is required, and that model just so happens to be licensing. If you buy a copy of software in a store, you don't buy the right to the software itself, you buy a license to use said software and to only use it within the parameters outlined in the EULA if there is such an agreement.

The only thing I am okay with as far as this is concerned, is sharing software or things which have long since been replaced by others or by the creator of the thing and that are no longer supported by a creator/developer. An example would be say, Photoshop CS3 Master Suite comes out... but I prefer to use a version several generations earlier, like say, Photoshop 5. Photoshop 5 is pretty much null and void at this point and pretty much becomes an obscurity. Such an obscure digital item rarely has any value to a developer/publisher in that the product is several development cycles beyond and the profit margin for the old product has disappeared entirely and been replaced to the Nth degree.

That doesn't make it right either, it just means that I'm okay with using vintage software that has obsolesced a thousand times over and will never be supported by its creators again.

Now, if as Shredder stated, we lived in a Utopian society...that society would probably involve people making or producing things, running the full gamut from food and shelter to video games - and doing it just because they want to share. If everyone fit the 'caring is sharing' or 'power of love > love of power' models, yeah it'd be like the word 'piracy' didn't exist and people would just be doing what they do.

As a Shredder surrogate for the purposes of this post, I'm not sure I agree with you. It might be fair once the makers of a product have abandoned it altogether (no more production, no more available stock), because then they are arguably no longer entitled to an expectation of profit from that product. But if, like Photoshop, they are releasing upgraded versions, they still expect people to pay them to be able to get the value from their work. I know 5.0, according to Wikipedia, is from 1998. But there are two problems with this logic. One is blah blah slippery slope, why not 6.0 and 7.0 and pretty soon you're all like, "CS4 is obsolete now that they're working on putting out CS6!" But I don't like those arguments, because there are few bright lines in our world. The possibly more relevant one is that you are depriving them of the profits they would make on you buying a newer version if you were unable to copy an older one for free.

Anyways, aren't there image editors offered by their makers for free today that are at least better than Photoshop 5.0?

I just used Photoshop as an example but really where it would apply is not in applications where there are persistent version updates but rather things that have long since been abandoned, aka Abandonware, which is totally legit.

As far as image editors go, I use The Gimp and as soon as I can fix my PayPal account I'll be using the Pro edition of Sumo Paint which is pretty much the tits and only costs like $30.


This: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news ... almost.ars

I'm starting to lol but who knows?

Interesting link there Kwang...and also so much fighting i just wanna know if streaming would be considered illegal if it passes (i kno its on the table now and not up for vote) cause i watch to much damn anime im not downloading anything and nor is anyone else they are just streaming their copy they bought to other users.

From my understanding of copyright law, watching a stream is legal unless the stream is illegal content (ie CP). Since you have no actual way to checking if the stream is licensed and there's a presumption on innocence, you have to assume that the streamer is operating legally until otherwise proven.

SOPA is a devastating piece of legislation that turns our legal system upside down by shifting the burden of proof to the defendant and allowing any copyright holder to force the shutdown of a website based on accusation alone. It is so poorly written that theoretically a copyright holder could force the shutdown and then win a court judgement upholding the action if the accuser feels that simply discussion of copyrighted content on a forum was unacceptable.

As with almost every law being passed these days there is really no need for it since enforcement of existing legislation in this area really does solve the problem. The government had no trouble shutting down Napster, Megaupload, and a myriad of other pirate sites under existing laws. The problem is that the legal system of the United States assumes the defendant is innocent until proven guilty and that is what the big media companies don't like. There is nothing in the SOPA act that is not already illegal. All it does is enable copyright holders to freely practice McCarthyism.

I am all for ensuring copyright holders rights, but SOPA is probably the single most damaging piece of legislation ever considered by Congress since the Patriot Act. It takes a sledgehammer to the foundation of our civil liberties and will no doubt pave the way for more draconian legislation in the years to come. In many ways it is a direct result of the willingness of the citizens of the United States to bend over and allow Patriot Act style legislation to completely circumvent the freedoms and liberties this country was built on.

NDAA anyone?

Nah bro didn't you hear, Obama said he wasn't gonna abuse the power so I think it's all good...

I thought they changed it so controversial parts of the NDAA didn't apply to American citizens and people captured within America. Was there something else very bad in the act that would affect people within America?

According to Wikipedia
"Nothing in this section shall be construed to affect existing law or authorities relating to the detention of United States citizens, lawful resident aliens of the United States, or any other persons who are captured or arrested in the United States."

So all i wanted was a Yes its illegal or No its not....i've read everything you've posted shreadder your very long winded but its some good read and you do know what your talking about..but simple questions = simple answers sometimes lol.