http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/30/AR2008043003360.html
Well…to all pirates out there, don’t download again or…well you’re fucked.
And yes, “Or….well” is a play-on words of Orwell.
Pirates are screwed, Big Boss Czar is gonna getcha!
heh, I’ve never understood how downloading a TV show is illegal, because, its no different than DVRing it or Recording it via VCR. As far as the bill goes, that’s just proof the government doesn’t give a flying fuck about the consumer, its a sad fact. All of these companies would be smarter to just accept the fact that the digital world and piracy go hand in hand, drop all the DRM schemes (all of them have been broken within weeks of their release upon the general public). Though, I will say as someone whom has been a part of “The Scene” for longer than torrents have been around, too many idiots have access to too much.
Pirates are screwed, Big Boss Czar is gonna getcha!
heh, I’ve never understood how downloading a TV show is illegal, because, its no different than DVRing it or Recording it via VCR
Right…and it’s also illegal to tape it or DVR it (or at least, it usually is illegal). It’s making a copy of a movie/TV show without permission.
All of these companies would be smarter to just accept the fact that the digital world and piracy go hand in hand
When the US loses 800 billion dollars a year on average due to just Piracy/Counterfeit, the companies and government are gonna notice, and it’s completely reasonable and rational to try and fix the problem. This is a little extreme, but 800 billion a year is also quite extreme.
Pirates are screwed, Big Boss Czar is gonna getcha!
Also, I watch TV online without the adverts and before it’s been shown on stations to which I have access (who will have to pay to show the show).
I have to say, though, the reason that I download films and music is because a) it’s more convenient and b) paying is way too expensive as the prices asked are extortionate.
Pirates are screwed, Big Boss Czar is gonna getcha!
Well…to all pirates out there, don’t upload again or…well you’re fucked.
sigh I fixed that for you. Pet peeve of mine. Sorry.
Just to clear up the misinformation in the first post, downloading is technically illegal in most circumstances, yes, but however it is, to date, completely impossible to enforce. Pirates, therefore, can still download as much as they want and never get caught as long as they do not upload. Nobody has ever been sued for downloading, ever. Every single person to have been sued has been sued for uploading because it is literally impossible to tell whether the downloader owns a legal copy of the piece of information and therefore has the license to make a personal copy, something still allowed under current law.
Note that the article more or less backs this up (making it a rarity. Most news articles on the subject are woefully misinformed). The word “downloading” is not ever featured in this article for a reason.
Also: This has only passed committee. Hopefully, it won’t make it much further, as it’s basically yet another tool for the MP/RIAA to sue people without going through due process.
Please note: I do not advocate illegal downloading. However, I also do not advocate scare-tactics and misinformation, which is exactly why the “OMG! Download and you go to jail!” rumors exist.
When the US loses 800 billion dollars a year on average due to just Piracy/Counterfeit, the companies and government are gonna notice, and it’s completely reasonable and rational to try and fix the problem. This is a little extreme, but 800 billion a year is also quite extreme.
I’d like to see the source of these numbers.
Pirates are screwed, Big Boss Czar is gonna getcha!
Just to clear up the misinformation in the first post, downloading is technically illegal in most circumstances, yes, but however it is, to date, completely impossible to enforce. Pirates, therefore, can still download as much as they want and never get caught as long as they do not upload. Nobody has ever been sued for downloading, ever. Every single person to have been sued has been sued for uploading because it is literally impossible to tell whether the downloader owns a legal copy of the piece of information and therefore has the license to make a personal copy, something still allowed under current law.
There isn’t a torrenting program that doesn’t require a minimum upload rate, or in their language, a seeding rate. Bitlord, Bitcomet, Bittorrent and UTorrent all require a minimum of 1kbps of uploading speed or more, which is impossible to avoid unless you have some programming skills capable of tampering with that.
I’d like to see the source of these numbers.
http://www.theglobalipcenter.com/gipc/ipfacts/default
http://www.oecdobserver.org/news/fullstory.php/aid/2278/
Two places, I don’t know if they are credible or not.
The numbers I came up with are indeed exaggerated (as I heard them from someone else), so I was wrong there, but still. 200 billion a year is quite a LOT of money, still too much to ignore in our current economy (if those sites are credible that is).
Pirates are screwed, Big Boss Czar is gonna getcha!
Firstly, you can absolutely torrent without uploading with absolutely no programming skill. It just takes a little google-fu. I’m not going to enable that, of course, but it is very, very easy to do. Furthermore, torrenting is not the only download tool out there. It is simply the most popular.
Secondly: Your first source is not a credible source. It is literally owned by the businesses who lobbied to get that bill in the first post written.
Thirdly: The piracy referenced in the second link is not bittorrent piracy, which technically costs no money and makes no money. It is more the sort that you see when somebody’s selling a few thousand bootlegs on the street, in Malaysia, or in the Flea Market. The OECD, the owner of the paper, is owned, again, by the companies “affected” by it.
So yeah. The numbers aren’t just exaggerated. They’re fabricated. When you download The Incredible Hulk, it does not technically cost Sony anything. What they’re assessing is potential costs, which is something totally different. They could just as soon, in other words, accuse you of stealing from Sony for not buying or watching that film at all.
Again, not saying that the downloading of owned IP is okay, in my eyes, but it is unenforceable and referencing sites made by the businesses whose only interest is protecting that property and basically born in conflict of interest is not the way to go. There are unbiased sites out there, though I can’t for the life of me remember where they are.
Pirates are screwed, Big Boss Czar is gonna getcha!
Firstly, you can absolutely torrent without uploading with absolutely no programming skill. It just takes a little google-fu. I’m not going to enable that, of course, but it is very, very easy to do. Furthermore, torrenting is not the only download tool out there. It is simply the most popular.
Torrenting and learning the functions of torrenting aren’t illegal. Torrenting copyrighted materials are.
I don’t know why you keep avoiding talking about torrenting, as it’s NOT piracy. There are a lot of direct download sites that include torrents as an option to their download mirrors.
When you download The Incredible Hulk, it does not technically cost Sony anything.
True, I guess the way to look at it is they don’t profit as much. If 1 person buys it, and the other downloads it illegally, that’s less money that Sony makes instead of both buying it, I understand that.
But, this has put a few companies out of business. Iron Lore to be precise. Not enough people bought their latest game, Titan Quest, and it caused them to go bankrupt.
http://www.ironlore.com/
http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/thq-director-blames-piracy-for-iron-lore-closure
There’s no direct evidence that Piracy is the fault, but it is extremely likely. Most game developers have to take out a loan to make a video game (essentially going into debt immediately) and they rely on the sales to get them out of the loan AND save up enough for another game.
There are likely other sources as to why they went bankrupt, but Piracy was likely a chunk of this.
I understand your point, but sometimes “not making money” is losing money. We all have bills to pay, especially Movie directors, Game developers, and Music Recorders with how much they have to actually spend. Going into debt is extremely easy for them, especially if they can’t find work for a while (designing video games is a rather hard field to obtain a job in).
Pirates are screwed, Big Boss Czar is gonna getcha!
Eh. Titan Quest failed because it was a ripoff, according to the sources I’ve seen, but that’s another subject entirely. Opinion weighs in heavily there. The fact is that THQ isn’t known for its savvy in PC markets in general and doesn’t normally turn out games fit for anything better than the Bargain Bin. When we get a five-years-too-late Diablo 2 ripoff, nobody should be surprised when it doesn’t get a good reception.
But, again, just my opinion.
I’m avoiding enabling unrestricted downloading in torrenting specifically because I am a person who, as an academic, torrents things legally (like research that I have done). Were folks to suck bandwidth like that, it would harm the legal torrenting folks a lot if they were to be hit by it.
Pirates are screwed, Big Boss Czar is gonna getcha!
Actually, It was voted best RPG by several reviewers and companies, and is considered a diablo clone that topped diablo by many people’s standards.
Besides, a LOT of people love Diablo clones, including myself. Sacred, Titan Quest, Divine Divinity, all good games but are only slightly different from Diablo/Diablo 2.
Oh, and just for the Record, Diablo and Diablo 2 ripped off Rogue.
Pirates are screwed, Big Boss Czar is gonna getcha!
Actually, It was voted best RPG by several reviewers and companies, and is considered a diablo clone that topped diablo by many people’s standards.
Besides, a LOT of people love Diablo clones, including myself. Sacred, Titan Quest, Divine Divinity, all good games but are only slightly different from Diablo/Diablo 2.
Oh, and just for the Record, Diablo and Diablo 2 ripped off Rogue.[/quote]
Completely beside the point, since Titan Quest, post closing of the company, still costs 50 dollars, not including its expansion, and has no useful community to speak of whereas D2 has its expansion and strong, perplexingly, servers and costs around half that for both of its installments, and, by all accounts, still has more playtime.
Basically, this is another case of taking biased narrative as fact. Also, check player reviews for a more accurate representation of TQ. It’s good, say the players, who are the only folks that matter, since reviews are often bought, but basically a would-be Diablo 2 without the oomph.
Because the developers were too dumb to put decent write protection onto the discs, however (and, yes, too dumb is operative. Every realistic release since '05 has had online registration for a reason), they have no way of proving that piracy had anything to do with their crappy sales numbers.
The concept D2 being a ripoff of Rogue is amusing, since Castle (as well as a few of the other B/W boot only ASCII titles) predates rogue by several years.
Pirates are screwed, Big Boss Czar is gonna getcha!
Completely beside the point, since Titan Quest, post closing of the company, still costs 50 dollars, not including its expansion, and has no useful community to speak of
Two things-
One, that brings me back to my original point, it cost too much, which is all the more a likely reason it was pirated, which is all the more a likely explanation as to why Iron Lore went under.
Secondly, “No useful community?”
What do you mean by that? Because TQVault is quite a huge modding/information community for Titan Quest. Not as big as Phrozen Keep for Diablo 2, but still quite large.
Pirates are screwed, Big Boss Czar is gonna getcha!
Large, in this case, is subjective. Feel free to discount my opinion. I’m used to much bigger communities.
There is still no evidence that TQ was actually pirated on any large scale… unless you have some? I’ll feel free to admit it if I see some. Until then, however, crappy numbers remains my assumption.
Pirates are screwed, Big Boss Czar is gonna getcha!
I have no evidence, but I will point out something you mentioned to me a while ago.
Occam’s Razor.
The simple explanation is that a leading factor in their bankruptcy is Piracy, and by far the likeliest. The cost of the game itself will indeed drive people away from buying it, and many of those people driven from buying it will instead download it, again piracy. The reviews that mention the poor programming and constant glitching will cause consumers to not buy the game, and many of those consumers who still might try it would resort to, guess what, Piracy.
Internet Piracy is bloody HUGE. Hell I’d be so bold as to say it’s one of the most common features of “the internet.” The video game Fallout 3 had over 200,000 downloads within the first couple of weeks all across the websites, which include Isohunt, Torrentspy, Mininova, Torrentreactor, TorrentZ, ThePirateBay, Scraptorrent, BTJunkie, and so on. 200,000 people downloaded Fallout 3 instead of bought it. At 60 bucks a copy, that’s 1.2 million dollars not earned, at the expense of the game itself.
You’re right, there is no evidence to say that Piracy is in fact the cause of Iron Lore’s downfall, but if any kind of evidence were to come up, it’d be extremely unlikely if it wasn’t piracy evidence.
Pirates are screwed, Big Boss Czar is gonna getcha!
They could just as soon, in other words, accuse you of stealing from Sony for not buying or watching that film at all.
This is wrong. If I watch the movie for free rather than some way that pays then I am clearly stealing. Just because you wouldn’t have paid for the diamond necklace you steal, doesn’t mean that you aren’t stealing when you take it. You download a movie, download music, and regardless of whether or not you would have bought it, you are taking something that is not given for free for free.
When I do have a chance though, I do actually pay for this kind of thing. Radiohead album (In Rainbows); I paid £5 for that. I’d pay a couple of quid perhaps (tops) to watch a film, or a few pounds for an album as well. £10-£20 however…
Pirates are screwed, Big Boss Czar is gonna getcha!
The thing is that there is a very specific reason why piracy is not in the same order of crimes as theft and has its own name. Theft has a specific physical piece of property being taken. Piracy does not. Theft is a taking of valued property. Piracy is a taking of potential value. Get it? Due to the current state of IP laws, however, the downloading portion of piracy is not enforceable.
On Occams Razor:
How is the game not selling well because it wasn’t very popular more complicated than it not selling well because it was pirated?
Pirates are screwed, Big Boss Czar is gonna getcha!
How is the game not selling well because it wasn’t very popular more complicated than it not selling well because it was pirated?
Not more complicated, Less Likely.
Pirates are screwed, Big Boss Czar is gonna getcha!
shrug Opinion, and an unsupported one. Why, if it is not more complicated, did you invoke Occam’s Razor, then? Methinks that you may wish to read up on what exactly it implies.
Pirates are screwed, Big Boss Czar is gonna getcha!
Occam’s Razor, the Simple answer is the likely answer.
In this case of it’s use, “Simple” refers to how likely or probable it is, not how non complex it is.
Maybe you need to reread Occam’s Razor, as there is no mention that it is always a difference between simplicity and complexity, and in fact has it’s own probability theories to go along with it.
But the definition of Occam’s Razor is off topic to this thread.
You’re point that it was the lack of sales that was a leading cause to Iron Lores downfall is valid, however I’m saying that a Lack of sales can be interpreted as “People pirate it instead of buy it” and that still coincides with you’re point. Mine is that Piracy can factor into that and many other area’s of why they went under, and I gave you plenty of examples, and in the end Piracy is a “Likely” result to the downfall of Iron Lore. It is not the result, that’s not what I’m saying, it’s all pure speculation.
Now, onto the thread topic, I would think that it is possible for an organization to track people pirating. I mean, all they’d have to do is place their own torrent up on a site like say, Mininova, people would download it, and they track the IP’s downloading it and use Said IP’s to actually locate the people. This might be too simple an explanation, but is it possible? I mean, if it is possible, maybe they’re trying to enforce it as hard as they possibly can with this Czar, actually making it something to fear.
Pirates are screwed, Big Boss Czar is gonna getcha!
Actually, that difference between theft and piracy is sophistic.
If you rob me of a bottle of vodka I was going to sell for £100 in my club you have actually deprived me only of the £10 it cost me (assuming that I have sufficient stock to sell as many as I would have otherwise and that you weren’t going to buy it otherwise). This means that the extra £90 is only potential.
With a film, even if I pay nothing rather than £20 you asked for, I am still robbing you of the fixed costs involved in producing and then distributing the film. Whilst is is true that this value is contingent upon the number of people partaking of the film, it is nonetheless fact that I am robbing you of valued property. Even if intellectual rights are intangible they are still valued property, hence the term ‘intellectual property’.
Don’t try and lie to yourself that piracy is not theft.