[Rurik]

A lot of piracy sites are going down.

Demonoid is currently down due to a a huge ddos attack.

Megaupload went down, along with a lot of other sites like that.

Piratebay is the main site currently. It doesn't respond to dmca takedowns, it's located in Sweden. If you create a product that gets put on piratebay, it basically gets raped and there's nothing you can do about it.

Do you think something like SOPA will pass, and that most piracy will be stopped in the future? What do you think about it?

My thoughts on piracy: it's stealing and it kills the economy. Of course we all like to get things for free, but the internet so far has basically been cyber-communism. If you create something like software, ebooks, video, etc., it can be "shared", and your profits smashed. You can dmca takedown some sites, but on others you can't (like piratebay).

It's really funny that so many people defend piracy, and even say that it's good for the economy, when clearly it isn't. A lot of pirates are people in the middle class who could afford to buy what they are pirating, but don't.

If you could walk into an apple store, and just grab ipads and macbook pros off the shelf, apples profits would be in the gutter. But defenders of piracy are like "the people who steal the ipads will give it a positive review, and then someone will buy it, and that will help apple". These types of rationalizations make up the bulk of pro-piracy arguments.

If something like SOPA passes, and the internet is no longer the wild-west of cyber-heists, the american economy is going to get a huge boost. If everyone around the world had to buy american software, movies, music, ebooks, etc., a ton of money would pour into the US, that is currently being cut short by people all over the world stealing what Americans (and elsewhere of course) create.

Of course, this could only be done if something like SOPA was strictly enforced.

This would mean the internet couldn't be what it currently is. It would mean copyright laws would have to be enforced. A lot of people think this is impossible that it's "just inevitable" that the internet will be "open", and everything "free", so that google can pimp out all the content creators.

"It's not like you're actually going to ENFORCE these EVIL "censorship laws" are you?"

SOPA was opposed by google. OF COURSE google is opposed to it. They want all the content to be free so that they can put ads on it and make money!

SOPA isn't about censorship. It's really just about stopping people from stealing everything on the internet. When I first heard about SOPA I thought it was evil. Then I thought about it a bit (which most of these young "intellectuals" don't actually do themselves).

My conclusion is that google and all the other Web 2.0 sites that profit from cyber-communism, set up the massive anti-sopa campaign, which was basically built on lies and misinformation.

[Basil Ransom]

What are you talking about?

SOPA is not an effective tool against piracy, according to the RIAA itself! http://torrentfreak.com/leaked-riaa-repo...cy-120727/

Why do people pirate? Because they can. They're getting more and paying less. From a strictly selfish perspective, it's rational to pirate. Recording companies have made the SAME calculation... and pirated.

The real question is, why don't people pirate more? Why don't they act rationally like corporations do - break the law when the expected payoff exceeds the expected punishment?

And get ready for piracy to get a whole lot bigger. No longer will people pirate just media, but also *things,* with the advent of 3D printing. http://www.extremetech.com/electronics/1...-of-piracy

Quote:

If everyone around the world had to buy american software, movies, music, ebooks, etc., a ton of money would pour into the US, that is currently being cut short by people all over the world stealing what Americans (and elsewhere of course) create.

Given how 90% of American cultural fare is destructive, I'd rather people didn't pay for it. Better if they don't line the pockets of Rosy O'Donnell, Rihanna, or Sharon Osbourne. And, your point isn't even necessarily correct. Maybe Chinese would produce more domestic content and consume less American content if their people would pirate less and buy more, leading to a greater diversity and quantity of content worldwide.

[Rurik]

(08-03-2012 08:20 PM)basilransom Wrote:  

What are you talking about?

SOPA is not an effective tool against piracy, according to the RIAA itself! http://torrentfreak.com/leaked-riaa-repo...cy-120727/

Why do people pirate? Because they can. They're getting more and paying less. From a strictly selfish perspective, it's rational to pirate. Recording companies have made the SAME calculation... and pirated.

The real question is, why don't people pirate more? Why don't they act rationally like corporations do - break the law when the expected payoff exceeds the expected punishment?

And get ready for piracy to get a whole lot bigger. No longer will people pirate just media, but also *things,* with the advent of 3D printing. http://www.extremetech.com/electronics/1...-of-piracy

Quote:

If everyone around the world had to buy american software, movies, music, ebooks, etc., a ton of money would pour into the US, that is currently being cut short by people all over the world stealing what Americans (and elsewhere of course) create.

Given how 90% of American cultural fare is destructive, I'd rather people didn't pay for it. Better if they don't line the pockets of Rosy O'Donnell, Rihanna, or Sharon Osbourne. And, your point isn't even necessarily correct. Maybe Chinese would produce more domestic content and consume less American content if their people would pirate less and buy more, leading to a greater diversity and quantity of content worldwide.

If you work to create something of value in the form of an information product, or anything that can be downloaded, it's going to get pirated and you won't be able to make money. That's a problem. The entire foundation of capitalism is being attacked by piracy. Why is this the minority view? Just because people are selfish?

It's true that many things for sale are crap, but that doesn't make sense to lump the people who make good things in with those who make garbage. People should have the right to make something and put a price on it, and be able to protect it.

Of course it makes sense that people pirate things, but the problem is if it isn't stopped, it's going to keep hurting our economy, it's going to hurt people who work to make things, to create, to innovate.


I've heard of 3d printing. We're probably a few good decades from that going mainstream, but it likely will happen at some point. I look forward to it actually.

[Rurik]

If I had to guess, I would say piratebay is going to go down very soon, and that 90 percent of piracy is going to be pretty much put to an end.

The internet is going to be much more tightly monitored in the future, for better or worse.

[Rurik]

(08-03-2012 08:20 PM)basilransom Wrote:  

What are you talking about?

SOPA is not an effective tool against piracy, according to the RIAA itself! http://torrentfreak.com/leaked-riaa-repo...cy-120727/

Why do people pirate? Because they can. They're getting more and paying less. From a strictly selfish perspective, it's rational to pirate. Recording companies have made the SAME calculation... and pirated.

The real question is, why don't people pirate more? Why don't they act rationally like corporations do - break the law when the expected payoff exceeds the expected punishment?

I never asked why people pirate.

[j r]

There will always be piracy just like there will always be theft and all sorts of other petty crimes. Piracy will likely subside once consumers have enough power to force content providers to unbundle.

There's no reason that I should have to pay a high monthly fee to some cable company for shitty service just to watch Game of Thrones when the technology exists for me to simply pay HBO to stream it directly to my computer. The only reason is that right now HBO makes more money from the cable companies and the cable companies won't let them.

Also, I don't see piracy as a clear cut issue. it's not exactly right, but it's also. it like walking into Walmart and stealing te DVD off the shelf. It's much more like one person buying the DVD and then lending it to all his friends and his friends' friends. It's a gray area, so don't pay much attention to the media companies' crocodile tears.

ps - I thought this thread was going to be about if it's safe to go to Somalia yet

[Rurik]

(08-03-2012 08:55 PM)j r Wrote:  

There will always be piracy just like there will always be theft and all sorts of other petty crimes. Piracy will likely subside once consumers have enough power to force content providers to unbundle.

There's no reason that I should have to pay a high monthly fee to some cable company for shitty service just to watch Game of Thrones when the technology exists for me to simply pay HBO to stream it directly to my computer. The only reason is that right now HBO makes more money from the cable companies and the cable companies won't let them.

Also, I don't see piracy as a clear cut issue. it's not exactly right, but it's also. it like walking into Walmart and stealing te DVD off the shelf. It's much more like one person buying the DVD and then lending it to all his friends and his friends' friends. It's a gray area, so don't pay much attention to the media companies' crocodile tears.

ps - I thought this thread was going to be about if it's safe to go to Somalia yet

There probably always will be piracy, but will people be able to just steal things online in mass? That's the bigger question.

People say it's a gray area, but it's pretty much just stealing, in 99 percent of cases.

[Architekt]

Personally, even if I couldn't pirate this stuff, the companies wouldn't be getting my money - I just wouldn't be able to afford a large majority of the stuff I download. I haven't personally made any difference to the sales they've made on CDs or whatever, but I can probably still make some kind of contribution to an artist or something. For instance, if I download music from a band and find I like them, I often endeavour to go to their show and buy merch. With software, there's almost always a free alternative anyway, so even if I can't get the best, there's always something I can get instead.

[Rurik]

One potential avenue for future piracy is selling hard drives. Especially if streaming porn sites were taken down, I could see people selling terabytes of porn.

[speakeasy]

I pirate music and software all the time. I'm under no illusion about it. I know it's both illegal and immoral and I don't feel good about doing it. But people will always get goods at the cheapest price possible, in this case nothing. Especially with little threat of retribution. That's just the way it is, like water runs downhill.

I just got Spotify finally and being able to listen to anything I want legally so that will certainly cut into my pirating.

[rlongo924]

A website that friends of mine for years used to rip music off of youtube stopped working the other day, I think that the powers that be are starting to crack down a little bit.

But piracy will never end, the younger generation (which a lot of us on here are a part of) don't really view it as being that serious of an offense, so it's virtually impossible to fully phase it out.

[liquiddrewl]

It's obvious that software makers are protecting their rights. Microsoft's new Office software will be tied into an online product where they can verify legitimate users. This is only the beginning of it all.

On a side note, I would have never read Bang if it wasn't for piracy. Sorry Roosh.

[Samseau]

The easiest way to stop piracy is to reduce the costs of information products. People will feel less inclined to pirate if what they are buying is only 10 bucks.


That said, piracy isn't going anywhere. None of my pirating sites are public domain, all private trackers. And there are millions of private tracker sites all over the world. If you don't have one, start making friends with some geeks.

[Tengen]

It's a big problem Down Under where we're feeling gouged - http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technol...23991.html

[el mechanico]

I thought this thread was going to be about pulling tail on the boat.

[teh_skeeze]

http://torrentfreak.com/bittorrent-pirac...ds-120517/

Someone did a study and found that piracy actually boosts sales. I think most people will support their favorite artists if they have the spare cash. Major record labels are like any other corporation, and look to fatten the bottom line by any means necessary. So they say that they are hurting because of people "stealing". Maybe the record labels should be more worried that the product that they put out is crap and all sounds the same (http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/07/27/the-...-the-same/).

As for software, I feel that a lot of it is ridiculously overpriced, or you can find a similar product for free (e.g. Microsoft Office compared to Open Office). One industry that I feel is a perfect example is video games. These days there's almost no creativity. They just put a new skin on an old FPS engine and call it a new game. Then they try to charge you $60. Then you look at one of my favorite games, Defense of the Ancients. The developer of that game has been doing it for free for the past 6 or 7 years. People tried to give him donations and he refused. Now he is working on the sequel which will be on Steam (Source engine, modified to give the WC3 layout of the original). The game will be free to play, but you can buy cosmetic updates for a nominal fee. The game is still in beta, but is one of the most played games on Steam. Icefrog is going to make his money, all because he refuses to alienate the community which has rallied around him.

[Excelsior]

(08-03-2012 07:43 PM)Rurik Wrote:  

A lot of piracy sites are going down.

Demonoid is currently down due to a a huge ddos attack.

Megaupload went down, along with a lot of other sites like that.

Piratebay is the main site currently. It doesn't respond to dmca takedowns, it's located in Sweden. If you create a product that gets put on piratebay, it basically gets raped and there's nothing you can do about it.

Do you think something like SOPA will pass, and that most piracy will be stopped in the future? What do you think about it?

Demonoid is down. Piratebay has had its recent struggles. Megaupload is long gone along with Filesonic, Fileserve, Upload.to (in the USA, anyway) and a few other filelockers who took pre-emptive measures.

For every one of the sites I have just listed, dozens more rose up to take their place, and dozens more still are waiting in the wings. Still hundreds more continue to hum along securely, well insulated from any current ruckus and largely (in most cases, almost entirely) unknown to media reports.

I'm not sure you're aware of just how deep this particular rabbit hole goes. Demonoid and Piratebay could disappear completely tomorrow (they won't). It would make very little difference in anything but the immediate term.

Quote:

My thoughts on piracy: it's stealing and it kills the economy.

I'd like to hear your treatise as to how precisely internet piracy is a major factor in economic stagnation and/or decline.
I doubt I'll buy it, but let's see you try to sell it first.

Quote:

Of course we all like to get things for free, but the internet so far has basically been cyber-communism. If you create something like software, ebooks, video, etc., it can be "shared", and your profits smashed.

The term communism is poorly applied here. The internet is more like a "wild west" than a tightly controlled, ostensibly egalitarian authoritarian state.

I'd actually say that the latter scenario is more in line with the objectives you outline in this post (which are calling for large increases in censorship) than the actual current online environment is or ever will be.

Quote:

You can dmca takedown some sites, but on others you can't (like piratebay).

DMCA is most effective against sites with American hosting/domains.

America tries, but it cannot police the world.

Quote:

It's really funny that so many people defend piracy, and even say that it's good for the economy, when clearly it isn't. A lot of pirates are people in the middle class who could afford to buy what they are pirating, but don't.

1. "A lot of". How many, exactly?
2. As for those who can afford to do what you say they can, how sure precisely are you that they will? Does the utility of the objects they pirate, in the aggregate, serve as the main factor behind their piracy? Or is it mere convenience that drives the phenomenon forward, with the pirates likely being unwilling to bother with the objects in any capacity were they not so easy to obtain?
Is it a combination of both these things? If so, does the balance favor one or the other?

Quote:

If you could walk into an apple store, and just grab ipads and macbook pros off the shelf, apples profits would be in the gutter.

The objects in question are quite distinct here (digital vs. tangible), which makes this analogy rather difficult to apply.
You also cannot assume that the result outlined in this scenario applies, or will apply.

Quote:

But defenders of piracy are like "the people who steal the ipads will give it a positive review, and then someone will buy it, and that will help apple". These types of rationalizations make up the bulk of pro-piracy arguments.

Again, digital vs. tangible products. Not the same. The pro-piracy argument you outline is much more applicable to something like a song (where the producers/musicians often depend on word of mouth to raise their profile and generate profits, just a portion of which actually come from album sales) than it is to an IPhone.

Quote:

If something like SOPA passes, and the internet is no longer the wild-west of cyber-heists, the american economy is going to get a huge boost. If everyone around the world had to buy american software, movies, music, ebooks, etc., a ton of money would pour into the US, that is currently being cut short by people all over the world stealing what Americans (and elsewhere of course) create.

One problem: they won't have to.

You've assumed that there exists an effective way to halt online piracy. This, in and of itself, is not possible. Much more restrictive policies than SOPA exist in other parts of the world, and even they are unable to accomplish what you seek.

Quote:

the american economy is going to get a huge boost...a ton of money would pour into the US

Aside from this, your theory here also seems to have in mind some sort of idea of just how much online piracy costs the US economy, and it seems to have concluded that this amount is enough to make some sort of significant difference in the trajectory of the United States economy.

You seem to be well ahead of all of us if you've already managed to locate that sum (a necessarily vast one, given its ability to impact a multi-trillion dollar economy) and pinpoint it so quickly, while also predicting its side effects down the road.

Want to elaborate on this a bit? Again, I don't think I'll buy it, but I'd like to see what you're trying to sell first.

Quote:

Of course, this could only be done if something like SOPA was strictly enforced.

Again, a mere dream. Pass SOPA today and I will have a way around it tomorrow. There will be tens of millions joining me in no time.

Quote:

This would mean the internet couldn't be what it currently is. It would mean copyright laws would have to be enforced. A lot of people think this is impossible that it's "just inevitable" that the internet will be "open", and everything "free", so that google can pimp out all the content creators.

"It's not like you're actually going to ENFORCE these EVIL "censorship laws" are you?"

You understand that you need people to support these laws before they go into effect, right?
You sure you're going to be able to convince the majority of the American public to buy into internet censorship?

Quote:

SOPA was opposed by google.

...and a veritable cavalry of other players alongside a wide swath of the American public.

Quote:

OF COURSE google is opposed to it. They want all the content to be free so that they can put ads on it and make money!

Sure, some of the opposition may have an ulterior motive (whether or not you are correct in making this particular accusation is another matter, but I digress).
What exactly makes you think the other side is also being entirely honest with you?

Quote:

SOPA isn't about censorship.

Hmmm....

Quote:

It's really just about stopping people from stealing everything on the internet.

...and it just conveniently would have happened to vastly expand the scope of direct control that some power players had over the internet by giving them many powers that would be, in many cases, unchecked, and essentially placing the heart of many American liberties into the hands of said players to do as they wish with little consequence.

Nothing to worry about, I guess. Small details.

Quote:

My conclusion is that google and all the other Web 2.0 sites that profit from cyber-communism, set up the massive anti-sopa campaign, which was basically built on lies and misinformation.

You deem the phenomenon you oppose to be evidence of "cyber-communism".

Then you propose censorship as a solution to it.

Interesting...

(08-03-2012 08:33 PM)Rurik Wrote:  

If you work to create something of value in the form of an information product, or anything that can be downloaded, it's going to get pirated and you won't be able to make money. That's a problem. The entire foundation of capitalism is being attacked by piracy.

Piracy is not necessarily an affront to the fundamental ethos of capitalism. It may or may not be considered to be at odds with some of the legal and/or moral concerns in our particular capitalist society, but that does not mean that it is at odds with the fundamentals of capitalism itself. It has, in fact, been used to uphold said fundamentals on more than one occasion.

Something does not have to be lawful (or even moral) to be considered in line with the tenets of what we traditionally consider to be "capitalism".
Large corporations prove this on a regular basis.

Quote:

It's true that many things for sale are crap, but that doesn't make sense to lump the people who make good things in with those who make garbage. People should have the right to make something and put a price on it, and be able to protect it. Of course it makes sense that people pirate things, but the problem is if it isn't stopped, it's going to keep hurting our economy, it's going to hurt people who work to make things, to create, to innovate.

You assume they have lost this right, and that this "hurt" is already occuring to some significant extent that will most certainly be reversed were we to put forward a draconian policy like SOPA. Is this reality?

I am not convinced that the damage has been (or will be) as great as you make it out to be.

Quote:

If I had to guess, I would say piratebay is going to go down very soon, and that 90 percent of piracy is going to be pretty much put to an end.

The internet is going to be much more tightly monitored in the future, for better or worse.

I'll ignore the claim that piratebay is going down "very soon" (unsubstantiated) and move to the latter call: you have no idea the extent to which pirates pervade the internet, nor do you have any idea of the tools (VPNs, secured P2ps, filelockers, and much, MUCH more) they have at their disposal.

The industry has no way of countering these tools to even a significant degree. You cannot stop the internet. You will not stop the internet.

They are too many, they are too numerous, and they are far, far too smart. In most cases, they know more about the environment they inhabit than those who are trying to stop them. The nature of the beast you're trying to tame is one that simply cannot be subdued in the way you seek.

The industry is quite well aware of this reality (basilransom has already shown as much), even if you are not. They battle now merely to try and cut their losses-in the long term, they will find a way to co-exist with pirates, but the fantasyland you dream of where 90% of pirate activity is gone will simply never come to pass.

They are not going anywhere.

(08-03-2012 09:26 PM)Rurik Wrote:  

One potential avenue for future piracy is selling hard drives. Especially if streaming porn sites were taken down, I could see people selling terabytes of porn.

Streaming tube sites going down?

You mean the same streaming tube sites that once threatened major porn companies/sites, and are now owned and promoted by those same companies/sites?
I won't even get into the amount of content on these tube sites that is generated by semi-pros and plain-old amateurs who place it there themselves for promotion or for shits and giggles (many large tubesites subsist largely on these kinds of content alone).

This is just another fantasy scenario displaying just how far head of you both pirates AND industry actually are. You will never be rid of streaming tube sites-industry knows this, which is why they now work with said sites. They're not going anywhere.

(08-03-2012 10:07 PM)rlongo924 Wrote:  

A website that friends of mine for years used to rip music off of youtube stopped working the other day, I think that the powers that be are starting to crack down a little bit.

And a dozen more rose to take its place.

Quote:

But piracy will never end, the younger generation (which a lot of us on here are a part of) don't really view it as being that serious of an offense, so it's virtually impossible to fully phase it out.

Bingo.

There are in actuality many ways to coexist with pirates, and many methods with which to minimize/slow down piracy. Censorship is not one of them, and is bound to fail in any and every way.

Those who fail to realize this are going to pay a very heavy price.

[Rurik]

(08-04-2012 03:02 AM)Athlone McGinnis Wrote:  

(08-03-2012 07:43 PM)Rurik Wrote:  

A lot of piracy sites are going down.

Demonoid is currently down due to a a huge ddos attack.

Megaupload went down, along with a lot of other sites like that.

Piratebay is the main site currently. It doesn't respond to dmca takedowns, it's located in Sweden. If you create a product that gets put on piratebay, it basically gets raped and there's nothing you can do about it.

Do you think something like SOPA will pass, and that most piracy will be stopped in the future? What do you think about it?

Demonoid is down. Piratebay has had its recent struggles. Megaupload is long gone along with Filesonic, Fileserve, Upload.to (in the USA, anyway) and a few other filelockers who took pre-emptive measures.

For every one of the sites I have just listed, dozens more rose up to take their place, and dozens more still are waiting in the wings. Still hundreds more continue to hum along securely, well insulated from any current ruckus and largely (in most cases, almost entirely) unknown to media reports.

I'm not sure you're aware of just how deep this particular rabbit hole goes. Demonoid and Piratebay could disappear completely tomorrow (they won't). It would make very little difference in anything but the immediate term.

Quote:

My thoughts on piracy: it's stealing and it kills the economy.

I'd like to hear your treatise as to how precisely internet piracy is a major factor in economic stagnation and/or decline.
I doubt I'll buy it, but let's see you try to sell it first.

Quote:

Of course we all like to get things for free, but the internet so far has basically been cyber-communism. If you create something like software, ebooks, video, etc., it can be "shared", and your profits smashed.

The term communism is poorly applied here. The internet is more like a "wild west" than a tightly controlled, ostensibly egalitarian authoritarian state.

I'd actually say that the latter scenario is more in line with the objectives you outline in this post (which are calling for large increases in censorship) than the actual current online environment is or ever will be.

Quote:

You can dmca takedown some sites, but on others you can't (like piratebay).

DMCA is most effective against sites with American hosting/domains.

America tries, but it cannot police the world.

Quote:

It's really funny that so many people defend piracy, and even say that it's good for the economy, when clearly it isn't. A lot of pirates are people in the middle class who could afford to buy what they are pirating, but don't.

1. "A lot of". How many, exactly?
2. As for those who can afford to do what you say they can, how sure precisely are you that they will? Does the utility of the objects they pirate, in the aggregate, serve as the main factor behind their piracy? Or is it mere convenience that drives the phenomenon forward, with the pirates likely being unwilling to bother with the objects in any capacity were they not so easy to obtain?
Is it a combination of both these things? If so, does the balance favor one or the other?

Quote:

If you could walk into an apple store, and just grab ipads and macbook pros off the shelf, apples profits would be in the gutter.

The objects in question are quite distinct here (digital vs. tangible), which makes this analogy rather difficult to apply.
You also cannot assume that the result outlined in this scenario applies, or will apply.

Quote:

But defenders of piracy are like "the people who steal the ipads will give it a positive review, and then someone will buy it, and that will help apple". These types of rationalizations make up the bulk of pro-piracy arguments.

Again, digital vs. tangible products. Not the same. The pro-piracy argument you outline is much more applicable to something like a song (where the producers/musicians often depend on word of mouth to raise their profile and generate profits, just a portion of which actually come from album sales) than it is to an IPhone.

Quote:

If something like SOPA passes, and the internet is no longer the wild-west of cyber-heists, the american economy is going to get a huge boost. If everyone around the world had to buy american software, movies, music, ebooks, etc., a ton of money would pour into the US, that is currently being cut short by people all over the world stealing what Americans (and elsewhere of course) create.

One problem: they won't have to.

You've assumed that there exists an effective way to halt online piracy. This, in and of itself, is not possible. Much more restrictive policies than SOPA exist in other parts of the world, and even they are unable to accomplish what you seek.

Quote:

the american economy is going to get a huge boost...a ton of money would pour into the US

Aside from this, your theory here also seems to have in mind some sort of idea of just how much online piracy costs the US economy, and it seems to have concluded that this amount is enough to make some sort of significant difference in the trajectory of the United States economy.

You seem to be well ahead of all of us if you've already managed to locate that sum (a necessarily vast one, given its ability to impact a multi-trillion dollar economy) and pinpoint it so quickly, while also predicting its side effects down the road.

Want to elaborate on this a bit? Again, I don't think I'll buy it, but I'd like to see what you're trying to sell first.

Quote:

Of course, this could only be done if something like SOPA was strictly enforced.

Again, a mere dream. Pass SOPA today and I will have a way around it tomorrow. There will be tens of millions joining me in no time.

Quote:

This would mean the internet couldn't be what it currently is. It would mean copyright laws would have to be enforced. A lot of people think this is impossible that it's "just inevitable" that the internet will be "open", and everything "free", so that google can pimp out all the content creators.

"It's not like you're actually going to ENFORCE these EVIL "censorship laws" are you?"

You understand that you need people to support these laws before they go into effect, right?
You sure you're going to be able to convince the majority of the American public to buy into internet censorship?

Quote:

SOPA was opposed by google.

...and a veritable cavalry of other players alongside a wide swath of the American public.

Quote:

OF COURSE google is opposed to it. They want all the content to be free so that they can put ads on it and make money!

Sure, some of the opposition may have an ulterior motive (whether or not you are correct in making this particular accusation is another matter, but I digress).
What exactly makes you think the other side is also being entirely honest with you?

Quote:

SOPA isn't about censorship.

Hmmm....

Quote:

It's really just about stopping people from stealing everything on the internet.

...and it just conveniently would have happened to vastly expand the scope of direct control that some power players had over the internet by giving them many powers that would be, in many cases, unchecked, and essentially placing the heart of many American liberties into the hands of said players to do as they wish with little consequence.

Nothing to worry about, I guess. Small details.

Quote:

My conclusion is that google and all the other Web 2.0 sites that profit from cyber-communism, set up the massive anti-sopa campaign, which was basically built on lies and misinformation.

You deem the phenomenon you oppose to be evidence of "cyber-communism".

Then you propose censorship as a solution to it.

Interesting...

(08-03-2012 08:33 PM)Rurik Wrote:  

If you work to create something of value in the form of an information product, or anything that can be downloaded, it's going to get pirated and you won't be able to make money. That's a problem. The entire foundation of capitalism is being attacked by piracy.

Piracy is not necessarily an affront to the fundamental ethos of capitalism. It may or may not be considered to be at odds with some of the legal and/or moral concerns in our particular capitalist society, but that does not mean that it is at odds with the fundamentals of capitalism itself. It has, in fact, been used to uphold said fundamentals on more than one occasion.

Something does not have to be lawful (or even moral) to be considered in line with the tenets of what we traditionally consider to be "capitalism".
Large corporations prove this on a regular basis.

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It's true that many things for sale are crap, but that doesn't make sense to lump the people who make good things in with those who make garbage. People should have the right to make something and put a price on it, and be able to protect it. Of course it makes sense that people pirate things, but the problem is if it isn't stopped, it's going to keep hurting our economy, it's going to hurt people who work to make things, to create, to innovate.

You assume they have lost this right, and that this "hurt" is already occuring to some significant extent that will most certainly be reversed were we to put forward a draconian policy like SOPA. Is this reality?

I am not convinced that the damage has been (or will be) as great as you make it out to be.

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If I had to guess, I would say piratebay is going to go down very soon, and that 90 percent of piracy is going to be pretty much put to an end.

The internet is going to be much more tightly monitored in the future, for better or worse.

I'll ignore the claim that piratebay is going down "very soon" (unsubstantiated) and move to the latter call: you have no idea the extent to which pirates pervade the internet, nor do you have any idea of the tools (VPNs, secured P2ps, filelockers, and much, MUCH more) they have at their disposal.

The industry has no way of countering these tools to even a significant degree. You cannot stop the internet. You will not stop the internet.

They are too many, they are too numerous, and they are far, far too smart. In most cases, they know more about the environment they inhabit than those who are trying to stop them. The nature of the beast you're trying to tame is one that simply cannot be subdued in the way you seek.

The industry is quite well aware of this reality (basilransom has already shown as much), even if you are not. They battle now merely to try and cut their losses-in the long term, they will find a way to co-exist with pirates, but the fantasyland you dream of where 90% of pirate activity is gone will simply never come to pass.

They are not going anywhere.

(08-03-2012 09:26 PM)Rurik Wrote:  

One potential avenue for future piracy is selling hard drives. Especially if streaming porn sites were taken down, I could see people selling terabytes of porn.

Streaming tube sites going down?

You mean the same streaming tube sites that once threatened major porn companies/sites, and are now owned and promoted by those same companies/sites?
I won't even get into the amount of content on these tube sites that is generated by semi-pros and plain-old amateurs who place it there themselves for promotion or for shits and giggles (many large tubesites subsist largely on these kinds of content alone).

This is just another fantasy scenario displaying just how far head of you both pirates AND industry actually are. You will never be rid of streaming tube sites-industry knows this, which is why they now work with said sites. They're not going anywhere.

(08-03-2012 10:07 PM)rlongo924 Wrote:  

A website that friends of mine for years used to rip music off of youtube stopped working the other day, I think that the powers that be are starting to crack down a little bit.

And a dozen more rose to take its place.

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But piracy will never end, the younger generation (which a lot of us on here are a part of) don't really view it as being that serious of an offense, so it's virtually impossible to fully phase it out.

Bingo.

There are in actuality many ways to coexist with pirates, and many methods with which to minimize/slow down piracy. Censorship is not one of them, and is bound to fail in any and every way.

Those who fail to realize this are going to pay a very heavy price.

1. YES. People pirate shit that they would otherwise buy if they couldn't pirate it. How big of a loss of this to the economy? Who knows. It could be in the trillions. Piracy of course comes with certain benefits to society, but there are certainly dramatic economic losses.

2. you use the word "censorship" without defining what that actually means.

3. Piracy is similar to communism, in that grain was confiscated from peasants, in the same way that anyone on the internet who creates a product (grain) has it forcefully taken and distributed from them.

4. The people who support piracy, see it as a benefit. This includes google, a whole host of the biggest web 2.0 sites, and social media sites. These groups dominate the internet.


5. Large scale piracy is definitely against capitalism, in the sense that in violates someone's right to create a product, and protect the distribution of that product.

6. You bring up the inevitability fallacy of piracy, without supporting with any argument. You assume piracy will continue, and that it can't be stopped.

[BortimusPrime]

I love how the estimates of the lost profits caused by internet piracy are so exaggerated that it sounds like if everyone paid for their music the record companies would be making a large share of the total economic productivity of the world.

[Thomas the Rhymer]

Throughout most of history, persons engaged in creative pursuits like actors, writers, artisits, etc. have been among the poorest of the poor, unless they could find a generous patron. No one ever felt that creative output deserved much in payment for a mere experience.

What was worth paying for, though, were inventions and tools and tangible goods.

The rise of the music record and of mass softcover printing has disturbed this greatly.

Now, scientists and technicians working on the next great invention are often relegated to the bottom rungs of the companies they work, and their research is 'owned' by companies and academic institutions, so all the money from developing stuff that actually adds value to peoples lives is sucked away from them.

And artists for the first time in history can become rich.

This is an absurd economic situation: innovation is punished, and useless music is rewarded. That which can improve society's problems goes unrewarded, but entertainment products which do nothing but distract you from those problems are rewarded.

I fail to see how economies can properly progress when creative activities are rewards instead of inventive one. Why would anyone want to be a poor scientists when they can be a rich basketball player?

I see the gradual destruction of copyright as a good thing. Money not spent on silly entertainment products will be spent on things of tangible value that can add value to one's life. Economic rewards will again flow towards innovation rather than creation.

People have been creating stuff for free since the dawn of time, and long before copyright existed, and people will still write books, make music, make art even if they are not paid for it. It's part of an inner drive to express imagination. The entertainment industry will deflate but it will never collapse just because of the death of copyright.

Artists must return to their rightful place on the bottom of the ladder, so that the people who actually do real things with their hands and make real stuff can return to the top.

It's absurd that governments have worked to increase copyright to 100 years after the death of the creator and yet an amazing invention that can save lives for some reason only gets 20 years cover under patent law. This is an absurd corruption of economic incentives. Why would someone work on inventions if instead they can write silly pop songs for more money? Which one will improve society more - an economic incentive to create or an economic incentive to innovate? I can live without a couple of DVD's in my collection if that means someone was economically inspired enough to invent something that would save my life.

[Caligula]

Piracy is a market problem, not a criminal one. Markets are inefficient making it rational to pirate. If people could get their hands on content easily for a low cost, there would be less incentive to pirate. Sure, there will always be some people who outright refuse to pay for digital content but most people I know would stop pirating if paid services were more convenient.

Eg. If you're in Europe you can't get your hands on a fraction of the films and series people with US iTunes accounts can get. Want to watch the new season of Breaking Bad? Tough shit, wait six months until it airs on a local network. If you want to watch it immediately you have two options. Either jump through a bunch of hoops to get a US iTunes account, pay and download. Or get it for free (often faster) on a torrent site. Rationally the former option makes no sense.

Until content providers fix their byzantine licensing structures it will not change and they'll continue to leave money on the table that many consumers would happily pay.

[Samseau]

Internet piracy is less an attack on the artists as it is an attack on the distributors. Today, the amount of artists who release their music hasn't changed much.

But the amount of middlemen peddling out the music has seen a sharp decline:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000s_in_t...y_Finances


In many ways, piracy has been good for music because it has removed the middlemen between music artists and the audience.

[Excelsior]

(08-04-2012 04:01 AM)Rurik Wrote:  

1. YES. People pirate shit that they would otherwise buy if they couldn't pirate it. How big of a loss of this to the economy? Who knows. It could be in the trillions.

It is actually most certainly is not in the trillions. Not even the entertainment industry's bloated estimates went that high, and we already know the reality to be much, much kinder to them.

Are you just making this up as you go along now?

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Piracy of course comes with certain benefits to society, but there are certainly dramatic economic losses.

Where?

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2. you use the word "censorship" without defining what that actually means.

I think you know precisely what censorship means. If you need some familiarization, google is your friend.
Censorship would have been the end result of the legal method you are now proposing (SOPA), which would have handed the government the power to blacklist wide swathes of the internet in a manner not dissimilar to that seen in China or Iran. It would have been the end of the free internet, and the beginning of a policy era much more in line "communism" you keep harping on about here.

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3. Piracy is similar to communism, in that grain was confiscated from peasants, in the same way that anyone on the internet who creates a product (grain) has it forcefully taken and distributed from them.

I don't even know where to begin with this. In fact, I'm not quite sure you really know what communism is.

I guess I'll just start with what I already said:

(08-04-2012 03:02 AM)Athlone McGinnis Wrote:  

The term communism is poorly applied here. The internet is more like a "wild west" than a tightly controlled, ostensibly egalitarian authoritarian state.

The internet is a wild west, a free-for-all with relatively few central leadership hubs. People merely do as they please online, and the sheer expanse of the thing makes it difficult to find and regulate them.
It has no parallels to communism, which necessitates a very strong, centralized, authoritarian power at the center of things that exerts near complete control over all aspects of a society and may ostensibly seek to "redistribute the wealth" (ex: taking grain, spreading it around or appropriating it for whatever use the state wants). Online piracy is not centralized, does not involve a strong central hub of direction, and is more concerned with individual satisfactions than broader societal ones.

Also:

(08-04-2012 03:02 AM)Athlone McGinnis Wrote:  

Again, digital vs. tangible products. Not the same. The pro-piracy argument you outline is much more applicable to something like a song (where the producers/musicians often depend on word of mouth to raise their profile and generate profits, just a portion of which actually come from album sales) than it is to an IPhone.

...or to grain. There is a big difference between confiscating tangible crops from peasants and downloading a digital file. The very nature of the two products (with one existing much more abundantly in a virtual medium where normal forces of supply and demand are entirely altered) undermines this comparison.

This analogy is just entirely off base.

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5. Large scale piracy is definitely against capitalism, in the sense that in violates someone's right to create a product, and protect the distribution of that product.

Respecting the ethos of capitalism in its fundamental sense does not requires one to respect copyrights. Once again:

(08-04-2012 03:02 AM)Athlone McGinnis Wrote:  

Piracy is not necessarily an affront to the fundamental ethos of capitalism. It may or may not be considered to be at odds with some of the legal and/or moral concerns in our particular capitalist society, but that does not mean that it is at odds with the fundamentals of capitalism itself. It has, in fact, been used to uphold said fundamentals on more than one occasion.

Something does not have to be lawful (or even moral) to be considered in line with the tenets of what we traditionally consider to be "capitalism".
Large corporations prove this on a regular basis.

Here you have tried to show that protected distribution and/or intellectual protection of copyrights is essential to the basic ethos of capitalism, which it is not.

What you are talking about is the violation of certain moral/legal tropes in our particular society, which large scale piracy is more likely to be at odds with. You've extrapolated modern rules in our state to apply to all capitalist theory, which is ignorant at best and outright disingenuous at worst.
One can be a capitalist and a pirate at the same time. The two are not, and have never been, mutually exclusive.

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6. You bring up the inevitability fallacy of piracy, without supporting with any argument. You assume piracy will continue, and that it can't be stopped.

1. You provided no support for your claim regarding the inevitable fall/decline of piracy.

2. I gave you plenty of reasons why I believe piracy will continue and pirates will not be going anywhere, contrary to your claim of its inevitable decline.

(08-04-2012 03:02 AM)Athlone McGinnis Wrote:  

I'll ignore the claim that piratebay is going down "very soon" (unsubstantiated) and move to the latter call: you have no idea the extent to which pirates pervade the internet, nor do you have any idea of the tools (VPNs, secured P2ps, filelockers, and much, MUCH more) they have at their disposal.

The industry has no way of countering these tools to even a significant degree. You cannot stop the internet. You will not stop the internet.

They are too many, they are too numerous, and they are far, far too smart. In most cases, they know more about the environment they inhabit than those who are trying to stop them. The nature of the beast you're trying to tame is one that simply cannot be subdued in the way you seek.

The industry is quite well aware of this reality (basilransom has already shown as much), even if you are not.

[Gmac]

Piracy isn't going anywhere. People are innovative and will always find a way.

[Hades]

As gay as it sounds, I consider piracy to be a form of progressive equality. Rich people already have access to good media, like blu-ray movies, full seasons of old tv shows, educational software, operating systems, good music, that sort of shit. It's not businesses, schools, or government that's pirating. It's mostly a smaller segment of computer-fluent 14-30 year old males.

I'm personally in favor of piracy. I wouldn't have the education and outlook that I currently have without access to better media. I also wouldn't have been able to go to college, because I snatch up copies of my textbooks off the internet. I'm poor as shit.

I also disagree that it hurts industries. The music industry (first of all) can go suck a dick. Most of the media I've consumed through piracy I would have never (ever) gone to see in theaters or bought otherwise. All that piracy is doing in relation to me and them is that when I eventually get a good job with money, I'm going to buy their shit, because I'm an example of "market penetration".