Author Topic: Extradition for copyright violation?  (Read 28076 times)

0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

Offline Herra Tohtori

  • The Academic
  • 211
  • Bad command or file name
Re: Extradition for copyright violation?
The way I see it, the film and record industry has two options.

A: They can proceed on the path they are on, and logically proceed to a place where they push for selling a license to watch a movie or listen to music, instead of concentrating on the ownership transition of a physical copy (note that they're still treating digital copies as being the same as physical copies in many ways).

This would be similar to having a Steam account - you buy a game, you can install, uninstall and re-download the game when you feel like it, if you have purchased it at some point.

Problem would, obviously, be the legislative issues of starting to treat what they sell essentially as permission to watch a movie, or permission to listen to some music. It'd be fairly hard to convince the legislative branch (not to speak of the general populace) that this would be in any way good or right.

Second problem would be monitoring, for obvious reasons. It's already almost impossible to keep track of unlicensed use of software, tracking unlicensed use of media would be even more so. You'd need 24/7 surveillance on all media playing devices and who is watching them. This approach, in the end, would require a shift to draconian police state just for monitoring and prevention of copyright violations.



B: They need to gather their sales from something that you can't get from downloading a digital copy. Increasing the appeal of a hard copy would be possible in several ways:

-inclusion of goodies (poster, packaging, codes that can get you benefits on something)

-making the material in such high quality that transferring it online would be inconvenient - BluRay movies already sort of have this approach. Transferring entire BluRay images via internet would be inconveniently slow, so instead lower quality rips are used. Granted, often the quality loss is hardly perceptible, but you could still boost the quality of the original data in a way that would mean the user benefits from owning a physical copy over a ripped digital copy. More frame rates, more resolution, 3D (two video streams)... and more advanced storage media.

Problem with this is that inclusion of goodies increases the cost of the end product, while increasing the quality of source material would increase production costs and also incur an increase in the price of the end product. It would also mean more advanced storage medias would be required, and heck, BluRay drives are still not as widely used as DVD-ROM drives are. An option would be to use solid state media such as flash memory (SD cards, USB keys) for the storage of the data instead.




For audio, there is a simple solution to declining records sales. Go back to vinyl long play disks (analog media) for the physical copies, and sell what digital copies you can through internets. The limitations of CD Audio (44kHz 16-bit PCM) are already so low that it's getting more convenient to download a FLAC copy of the disk contents, without any loss of quality.

This type of physical copy is something that has value of its own. Each copy is an individual, and theoretically analog signal can overcome certain limitations of the digital medias. The packaging options of LP albums are also much more interesting than those of a CD album; cover art, track listing and other stuff can be a lot bigger, to start with.


I'll grant that it's rather hard to increase the appeal of a physical copy, though, but I'm sure they could think of ways to do this if they wanted.



Of course, the problem with piratism is that most people don't perceive it as "wrong". Their morals don't speak against it because there is no clear, tangible loss incurred to a person that they can see. In a way, online digital piratism is simply a more convenient and widespread form of the same thing that has gone on since time immemorial with C-cassettes and VHS tapes. People have been copying CD's and VHS films for a long time from their friends; what the internet and P2P networking enables is doing this with digital media. In other words, people think in terms of physical copies. Since copying does not destroy the original, it doesn't equate to theft in most peoples' moral gamut.

Previously, the media corporations covered this by lobbying for copyright fees for storage media (and they got it for most of them - the legitimacy of this can be argued elsewhere). But with online piratism, they aren't getting even that, and they're in a right tizz over it. So, I can see them trying to push the industry towards media licensing instead of sales of copies; make people buy a permission to watch a movie or listen to music, instead of bothering with the copies and copying. But for problems I listed earlier, this is not likely to happen.



Of course, the third option for the media corps is to ignore digital online trafficking entirely, reduce cost of films, and increase their quality so that more people will feel morally obliged to pay for their entertainment. There have been a few interesting experiments on this - Star Wreck VI: In the Pirkinning was actually released on DVD and free download (with lower quality) at the same time, and though I am unsure of how many DVD copies they ultimately sold, they eventually made a contract with Universal to distribute their film in a re-rendered format (to replace obvious Star Trek and Babylon 5 designs with inspired, but original designs) and apparently that, too sold rather well... though as I said I don't know the actual sales numbers.

The point is, they made something really cool (not perhaps the best of films, not great, but very cool nonetheless) with small budget, and it was a overall a big success despite them launching the lower quality downloads at the same time as the original DVD sales.

So, maybe the answer isn't to crackdown on the pirates, to increase monitoring and copy protection to draconian levels to prevent and punish those who would get their copies online, but to increase profits by lowering the costs while concentrating on quality of the finished works. If the online copying hurts the profits so badly, perhaps it would be more beneficial to try to find ways of making people not want to pirate, instead of... making people want to pirate just out of spite.
There are three things that last forever: Abort, Retry, Fail - and the greatest of these is Fail.

 

Offline Bobboau

  • Just a MODern kinda guy
    Just MODerately cool
    And MODest too
  • 213
Re: Extradition for copyright violation?
or they could make their money off of performances and merchandise.
do not charge for the music, but sell paraphernalia.
Bobboau, bringing you products that work... in theory
learn to use PCS
creator of the ProXimus Procedural Texture and Effect Generator
My latest build of PCS2, get it while it's hot!
PCS 2.0.3


DEUTERONOMY 22:11
Thou shalt not wear a garment of diverse sorts, [as] of woollen and linen together

 

Offline Herra Tohtori

  • The Academic
  • 211
  • Bad command or file name
Re: Extradition for copyright violation?
or they could make their money off of performances and merchandise.
do not charge for the music, but sell paraphernalia.


Yes, covered in "B: They need to gather their sales [revenue] from something that you can't get from downloading a digital copy."
There are three things that last forever: Abort, Retry, Fail - and the greatest of these is Fail.

 

Offline Bobboau

  • Just a MODern kinda guy
    Just MODerately cool
    And MODest too
  • 213
Re: Extradition for copyright violation?
Yeah, I was elaborating on an angle i felt that you did not cover sufficently.
Spcificly that distribution of the media and money made from it did not necessarily have to be directly coupled.
Bobboau, bringing you products that work... in theory
learn to use PCS
creator of the ProXimus Procedural Texture and Effect Generator
My latest build of PCS2, get it while it's hot!
PCS 2.0.3


DEUTERONOMY 22:11
Thou shalt not wear a garment of diverse sorts, [as] of woollen and linen together

 

Offline Herra Tohtori

  • The Academic
  • 211
  • Bad command or file name
Re: Extradition for copyright violation?
Yeah, I was elaborating on an angle i felt that you did not cover sufficently.
Spcificly that distribution of the media and money made from it did not necessarily have to be directly coupled.


True.
There are three things that last forever: Abort, Retry, Fail - and the greatest of these is Fail.

 

Offline Luis Dias

  • 211
Re: Extradition for copyright violation?
I don't think you have any idea what I disagree with Cory Doctorow about, but you can feel free to make up some reasons and then argue with them (I can write you a chatbot to help if you like, we can even pretend I support DRM and am really stressed out about piracy)

Sorry, jumped the shark there. Now you know how I feel for about 95% of the time that I discuss with you.

And BTW, I never said anything bad about feminism.


EDIT: Having read Battuta's points in the last page I have to say that I am boringly in almost perfect agreement with him there.

But do you agree the Cory Doctorow is a mediocre writer!?!?!?!?!?!nterrobang

Couldn't tell. Never read his stories, apart from a very tiny short one. I guess he was never on my radar that much because I always heard that he wasn't that good anyway.

 

Offline Luis Dias

  • 211
Re: Extradition for copyright violation?
Well if that was true, then Playstation, Xbox or Wii wouldn't exist and make so much money.

Because it is ABSOLUTLY IMPOSSIBLE to pirate a video game.

You missed the point. XBoxes PSions et al do not sell like cupcakes because they are "piratable". Most people who buy them will never hack nor pirate anything for them. Someone argued that if piracy was "impossible" PCs wouldn't sell. I merely pointed out a counter example: XBoxes etc ARE PCs whose economics alone DEPEND upon you also buying the software for it.

If piracy was "impossible" in these machines, they would be more profitable, not less.


Personally I have nothing against physical limitations to machines preventing you from pirating whatever you want. If that's what people want, then why not sell them this kind of stuff? We see it all the time, in PStations, in iPads, and it works. I only get bothered when the police is actually intervening in the process and harrassing people coz they *dared* make a copy of Dragon Age. **** them.
« Last Edit: June 18, 2011, 07:46:14 pm by Luis Dias »

 

Offline karajorma

  • King Louie - Jungle VIP
  • Administrator
  • 214
    • Karajorma's Freespace FAQ
Re: Extradition for copyright violation?
Are you really equating the console market with the PC market in terms of how willing they are to accept DRM? I just want to know cause if you are I think I can safely dispense with listening to a word you say.
« Last Edit: June 18, 2011, 07:52:11 pm by karajorma »
Karajorma's Freespace FAQ. It's almost like asking me yourself.

[ Diaspora ] - [ Seeds Of Rebellion ] - [ Mind Games ]

 

Offline Luis Dias

  • 211
Re: Extradition for copyright violation?
Are you really equating the console market with the PC market in terms of how willing they are to accept DRM? I just want to know cause if you are I think I can safely dispense with listening to a word you say.

Yes I know you hate whatever I say, even when it makes sense and you willfully misconstrue it so you can hate me more...

No, I was exactly making the opposite argument: that the console market is a testament to the willfulness of the public in buying into a full DRM market, vs the wild wild west of the PC landscape, where everything happens. If you go see the iPad/iPod/iPhone market, it's the exact same stuff, it's by a wide margin the best offer of smartphone apps and it's the most closed thing ever. Which eBook reader is the most successful? The one which is connected to the biggest eBook store of the world.... etc.

Mind you, all these devices are "PCs" too, they are just much specialized. They are very complex computers that you chose to spend money, rather than buying a general purpose PC. The fact that people choose this  market with their money is a testament to the DRM way.

Not that I like it though.

 

Offline karajorma

  • King Louie - Jungle VIP
  • Administrator
  • 214
    • Karajorma's Freespace FAQ
Re: Extradition for copyright violation?
Then you've completely missed the point that the PC market is very different to the console market. People won't put up with things in the PC market that they don't give a toss about in the console market.

The reason why Windows is still around is because there are a lot of people who have never had a good enough reason to move away from it. Despite all the problems with it, none of them are large enough to make it worth the move to Linux or any other alternate system. This however would be big enough. It would convince a lot of IT professionals who had never thought it worth changing to make the change. Once they were gone, Windows would pretty quickly lose its userbase because although they are a small percentage of the Windows users, it's the highly computer literate who keep people actually using Windows.

Consoles simply don't have this effect because they are so simple to use that you don't need a userbase of highly computer literate people to keep things ticking over. You're comparing apples to oranges bringing up the consoles. They only serve as an example for people who don't want the range of functions a PC offers.
Karajorma's Freespace FAQ. It's almost like asking me yourself.

[ Diaspora ] - [ Seeds Of Rebellion ] - [ Mind Games ]

  

Offline Kosh

  • A year behind what's funny
  • 210
Re: Extradition for copyright violation?
Then you've completely missed the point that the PC market is very different to the console market. People won't put up with things in the PC market that they don't give a toss about in the console market.

The reason why Windows is still around is because there are a lot of people who have never had a good enough reason to move away from it. Despite all the problems with it, none of them are large enough to make it worth the move to Linux or any other alternate system. This however would be big enough. It would convince a lot of IT professionals who had never thought it worth changing to make the change. Once they were gone, Windows would pretty quickly lose its userbase because although they are a small percentage of the Windows users, it's the highly computer literate who keep people actually using Windows.

Consoles simply don't have this effect because they are so simple to use that you don't need a userbase of highly computer literate people to keep things ticking over. You're comparing apples to oranges bringing up the consoles. They only serve as an example for people who don't want the range of functions a PC offers.


Indeed, and even today half of the PCs in the world have Windows XP on them even after Vista and Windows 7.
"The reason for this is that the original Fortran got so convoluted and extensive (10's of millions of lines of code) that no-one can actually figure out how it works, there's a massive project going on to decode the original Fortran and write a more modern system, but until then, the UK communication network is actually relying heavily on 35 year old Fortran that nobody understands." - Flipside

Brain I/O error
Replace and press any key

 
Re: Extradition for copyright violation?
a thief is a thief is a thief. I have about as much respect for a theif as i do a rapist. I think every single one of em should be persicuted, prosicuted, fined, jailed, etc. People shouldn't steal something and think that it was okay because the likely hood of them getting caught is slim. That's just straight bs. Why anyone would support this behavior and mentality is beyond me... get off your bum ass and go pay for your ****!

That said, should the government spend millions of dollars to enforce copywright laws? I don't believe that to be the answer. It should lie solely in the hands of the manufacturers to protect their works... if someone steals it, go to the police file a report... just like any one of us would have to do if someone breaks into our homes, our car, etc.

These folks work too damn hard (most of the time) to keep the world entertained and if they want to charge people to use it, so be it, thats up to them. If you don't like it, too f'n bad, either pay for it or do with out.


 

Offline headdie

  • i don't use punctuation lol
  • 212
  • Lawful Neutral with a Chaotic outook
    • Skype
    • Twitter
    • Headdie on Deviant Art
Re: Extradition for copyright violation?
Then you've completely missed the point that the PC market is very different to the console market. People won't put up with things in the PC market that they don't give a toss about in the console market.

The reason why Windows is still around is because there are a lot of people who have never had a good enough reason to move away from it. Despite all the problems with it, none of them are large enough to make it worth the move to Linux or any other alternate system. This however would be big enough. It would convince a lot of IT professionals who had never thought it worth changing to make the change. Once they were gone, Windows would pretty quickly lose its userbase because although they are a small percentage of the Windows users, it's the highly computer literate who keep people actually using Windows.

Consoles simply don't have this effect because they are so simple to use that you don't need a userbase of highly computer literate people to keep things ticking over. You're comparing apples to oranges bringing up the consoles. They only serve as an example for people who don't want the range of functions a PC offers.


Indeed, and even today half of the PCs in the world have Windows XP on them even after Vista and Windows 7.

* headdie puts his hand up

but then my rig is so old that newer versions of windows would probably stop a lot of the newer games I have running due to bumping the sys requirements
Minister of Interstellar Affairs Sol Union - Retired
quote General Battuta - "FRED is canon!"
Contact me at [email protected]
My Release Thread, Old Release Thread, Celestial Objects Thread, My rubbish attempts at art

 

Offline karajorma

  • King Louie - Jungle VIP
  • Administrator
  • 214
    • Karajorma's Freespace FAQ
Re: Extradition for copyright violation?
Indeed, and even today half of the PCs in the world have Windows XP on them even after Vista and Windows 7.

Yep, that's the other major reason it wouldn't work. It would require everyone to upgrade both hard and software in order to do exactly what the PC could do before. That's gonna stick in some people's craw.
Karajorma's Freespace FAQ. It's almost like asking me yourself.

[ Diaspora ] - [ Seeds Of Rebellion ] - [ Mind Games ]

 

Offline Herra Tohtori

  • The Academic
  • 211
  • Bad command or file name
Re: Extradition for copyright violation?
Disclaimer: This post contains hypothetical examples and shouldn't be considered admission or approval of anything.

a thief is a thief is a thief. I have about as much respect for a theif as i do a rapist. I think every single one of em should be persicuted, prosicuted, fined, jailed, etc.

Interesting. Do you also think rape and theft should be punished equally?

What about petty theft and murder? Do you respect a pickpocket less or more than a murderer?

Also, persecution is a process in which individual or group is illegitimately harassed, accused or punished for something (anything that the persecuting group or person can think of). Prosecution is a legal process of officially accusing a person of committing a crime.


Quote
People shouldn't steal something and think that it was okay because the likely hood of them getting caught is slim. That's just straight bs. Why anyone would support this behavior and mentality is beyond me... get off your bum ass and go pay for your ****!

You're making an assumption that people think piracy is ok because risk of getting caught is negligible. In fact, I believe people pirate stuff because they do not view it as being wrong, even though they might know it to be illegal.

Also, theft incurs a loss. What is being stolen, though? The typical argument against piracy involves a lot of hypotheticals, including "possible sales" or "lost revenue". I like to call these "virtual losses" since it's obvious they aren't real losses, and it's hard to determine their potential impact on the sales just by equating each downloader as one lost buyer.


By the way, are we making an assumption here that there should always be a price paid by the user for viewing a film or listening to music or playing a game? Perhaps instead of a physical media, we should be buying licenses or permissions to use some media - maybe even include a clause that says how many times we are allowed to watch a movie with certain license, or maybe a limited time frame during which we may use the media as much as we can or want?


If so, should that price be uniform and always the same? What about renting a movie/cd/game instead of buying a copy of your own? Or how about borrowing it from a friend to watch it, then returning it?


Quote
That said, should the government spend millions of dollars to enforce copywright laws? I don't believe that to be the answer. It should lie solely in the hands of the manufacturers to protect their works... if someone steals it, go to the police file a report... just like any one of us would have to do if someone breaks into our homes, our car, etc.

These folks work too damn hard (most of the time) to keep the world entertained and if they want to charge people to use it, so be it, thats up to them. If you don't like it, too f'n bad, either pay for it or do with out.

Ah, but I do want to be entertained! The problem here is, does the price tag match the value that the product gives to me in my opinion? If not, can I haggle the price lower? Can I return the product if I think it wasn't worth the price?

What you're saying is that for entertainment industry, people should just accept that they have to buy a pig in a poke.

Luckily, there are perfectly legitimate methods of watching movies and listening to music without any specific cost to them.

It's called public libraries, and they sometimes also offer books for free, and indeed I have heard of some libraries borrowing computer games as well.

Imagine that - being able to borrow something like that, and not having to ever touch the internet to do it.


Now, you might argue that the libraries pay royalties for their right to borrow items, and you would be right to say that. They are usually funded by tax money and provide a wonderful service.

However, ethically this presents an interesting dilemma. If I can get a film from a library, or I can get the same exact film from some torrent, without the trouble of actually walking into the library and grabbing the physical copy of the film, I can obviously get the same entertainment experience from it either way, and with same cost to my person.

Is there some significant difference between the method of acquisition that makes one way a theft and one way legitimate?


Same can be applied to public broadcasts of TV series and films. It is trivial to save a broadcast for personal use, and peruse it at any later date, instead of buying an outrageously priced (but possibly nicely packaged) DVD box set of the series, or a movie. The broadcast is paid, and generates revenue for the artists, producers and distributing company, and everyone is happy - but somehow, if I download an episode of tv-series or a movie, it becomes piracy.

There's a mismatch here somewhere, and I don't know where.

By the way, people have been doing this ever since VHS - digital TV just makes things even more convenient.


In fact, here we get into the core of the issue. The entertainment industry, like any business, relies on the laws of supply and demand to run itself. But with digital copying, it is trivial to make a copy - so this means there is much more supply than demand, and the prices should technically go down - except they're being hiked up in desperate attempt to cover virtual losses, which further reduces the demand of the legitimate copies.

Some of you might be familiar with the term artificial scarcity. That's what the entertainment industry is forced to try to maintain, even with the overabundant supply of (illegitimate) digital copies.


Your point about the people working hard to keep us entertained is a perfectly legitimate one; however, looking at the way of living of the most visible members of entertainment industry, it doesn't occur to most people to think that they require economical support.

To be plain, people think it's unnecessary to give their money to them so they can have another solid gold Humvee. And I'm not talking just about the artists - they get only a fraction of the price you pay in royalties. The rest goes to fund the enormous bureaucracy of the media giant corporations that run the whole business (again, based on artificial scarcity).

Small name artists who DON'T yet have a solid gold Humvee, only have one or two albums out... to them, recognition is probably more valuable than the direct royalties from album sales. Their stuff being distributed online from peer to peer can be a very powerful advertising channel, especially if the majority of their revenue comes from live gigs rather than studio album sales. But this argument has been played through a lot of times, and there are people with strong opinions for and against - thus I would leave this for individual artists to decide.



What I'm saying here is that right and wrong, good and bad don't always coincide with lawful and illegal, legitimate and illegitimate. It is difficult to use existing terms to describe what goes on, but "theft" is a decidedly inaccurate term to describe online piracy. "Exploitation" might be a better term, but then we all exploit methods of getting the same goods by paying less (such as libraries or borrowing a game or movie or music album from a friend).

It is hard to draw a line between downloading something and borrowing something from a friend physically.

Now, re-distributing things, that's where things get hairier. Technically, the P2P networking (torrents) means you're continuously distributing the stuff you're downloading, which is the same as making a copy of the media you borrowed from library or a friend, then making copies of it to hand forward.

This, also, has been going on for as long as C-cassettes have been in existence. People have been making copies of LP albums of music, copies of VHS films, copies of CD audio, DVD films, and copies of BluRay films. There really is nothing conceptually new in this behaviour, only the response from the entertainment industry has changed.

Why? Because they haven't been able to enforce private taxes on every new storage media to cut their virtual losses, like they did to C-cassettes, VHS cassettes and optical storage medias (CD/DVD-R's). I know they are trying hard to have that private tax on storage medias such as USB sticks, SD cards, cell phones, hard disk drives and probably paper since you can print copyrighted words on it.

This private tax is essentially something that is supposed to rely on assumption that some of the storage media sold will be used for illegal copying, but somehow it still doesn't justify the copying done (one would think that since they get compensated for it from the price of these products, it would be okay to copy anything on these medias, eh?), and only serves to hike up the prices of said medias to inconvenience everyone - including those who have no interest in using the media for any illegitimate purposes at all.


All in all, I'll say this: I have infinitely more respect towards the artists who actually make this stuff, than those who distribute it, set an arbitrary price tag for it, and give the scraps to the aforementioned artists, and rest is used to fund the distribution business and bureaucracy, lobby for some more draconian copyright laws to preserve the status quo, and to pay for lawyers.
There are three things that last forever: Abort, Retry, Fail - and the greatest of these is Fail.

 

Offline Luis Dias

  • 211
Re: Extradition for copyright violation?
Then you've completely missed the point that the PC market is very different to the console market. People won't put up with things in the PC market that they don't give a toss about in the console market.

What the hell? Am I talking to a wall here?

Hey man, PS3, XBoxes, Wiis, iPads, iPods, iPhones, Android closed devices, Kindles, etc. ARE PCs too. When people want to play games, they won't buy a general PC and then the game. They'll buy these DRM devices and play within them. That's where the money is now.

The fact that these things are widely bought and have huge profits right now is a testament that people are willing to "put up with" DRM shenanigans because the whole device ecossystems are much more streamlined and without technical worries. You don't have to worry about the "SPECS" of the PCs, you don't have to worry about anything. You just buy the DRM device and you know it will work with the product that was made for it.

You are still thinking that Game Consoles =/= PCs, but they are actually not. Game Consoles = PCs + vertical integrated DRM.

Quote
The reason why Windows is still around is because there are a lot of people who have never had a good enough reason to move away from it. Despite all the problems with it, none of them are large enough to make it worth the move to Linux or any other alternate system. This however would be big enough. It would convince a lot of IT professionals who had never thought it worth changing to make the change. Once they were gone, Windows would pretty quickly lose its userbase because although they are a small percentage of the Windows users, it's the highly computer literate who keep people actually using Windows.

So please explain me the success of the Mac App Store and the general i App Store, etc. How do you square those out?

The trouble with the current markets is that the price of software is extremely high, due to the fact that most people will not buy the software, they will pirate it. However, if you can manage a transfer from this wild west to a "walled garden", where the software is reachable by a store (or stores) in the netz by hundreds of millions of buyers, you would have the potential to lower (big time) the price of software and make a ton of money out of it.

I'm not saying that the age of piracy will be over. I'm saying that we are bound to enter a new paradigm, one where piracy will be competed with DRM low cost markets.

Take the Apple Mac App Store. It will be in effect in OS X Lion, and there will be apps that will only be available through it. Now imagine that within a decade, most apps will only be available in a kind of store like that. Yeah, piracy will still be available (just like piracy is still possible in PS3, etc.) but it will be minorated.

Quote
Consoles simply don't have this effect because they are so simple to use that you don't need a userbase of highly computer literate people to keep things ticking over. You're comparing apples to oranges bringing up the consoles. They only serve as an example for people who don't want the range of functions a PC offers.

Consoles ARE easily to use PCs. And they sell like hell. Why the hell shouldn't I compare them just because consoles are "simpler to use"? That makes no sense at all.

 

Offline NGTM-1R

  • I reject your reality and substitute my own
  • 213
  • Syndral Active. 0410.
Re: Extradition for copyright violation?
Consoles ARE easily to use PCs. And they sell like hell. Why the hell shouldn't I compare them just because consoles are "simpler to use"? That makes no sense at all.

In that case, I eagerly look forward to your elaboration on why Macs are also PCs and consoles, because...

That's what they are. A Mac, like a console, is a PC with an absolutely fixed hardware set (in theory) and ease-of-use improvements.
"Load sabot. Target Zaku, direct front!"

A Feddie Story

 

Offline Luis Dias

  • 211
Re: Extradition for copyright violation?
a thief is a thief is a thief. I have about as much respect for a theif as i do a rapist. I think every single one of em should be persicuted, prosicuted, fined, jailed, etc. People shouldn't steal something and think that it was okay because the likely hood of them getting caught is slim. That's just straight bs. Why anyone would support this behavior and mentality is beyond me... get off your bum ass and go pay for your ****!

That's just silly. Bernard Shaw had a quote that is slightly similar to what I mean here:

If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas

Equally, if you steal a purse, you are denying the purse to your victim. If you "steal" software, you are just adding to the whole.

The only problem arising is the lack of revenue for the developers. Things get a little morally difficult however when said developers are making tons of money out of overpriced goods, and when most "pirates" live in less developed countries who have not 50 dollars to spend in a game, or 1000 dollars to spend in the latest Autocad.

Quote
That said, should the government spend millions of dollars to enforce copywright laws? I don't believe that to be the answer. It should lie solely in the hands of the manufacturers to protect their works... if someone steals it, go to the police file a report... just like any one of us would have to do if someone breaks into our homes, our car, etc.

But that's exactly what is happening... your example is "spending millions of dollars" in police work.

Quote
These folks work too damn hard (most of the time) to keep the world entertained and if they want to charge people to use it, so be it, thats up to them. If you don't like it, too f'n bad, either pay for it or do with out.

Yeah, that speech will definitely sway the pirates...

 

Offline Luis Dias

  • 211
Re: Extradition for copyright violation?
Double post sorry

 

Offline Luis Dias

  • 211
Re: Extradition for copyright violation?
Consoles ARE easily to use PCs. And they sell like hell. Why the hell shouldn't I compare them just because consoles are "simpler to use"? That makes no sense at all.

In that case, I eagerly look forward to your elaboration on why Macs are also PCs and consoles, because...

That's what they are. A Mac, like a console, is a PC with an absolutely fixed hardware set (in theory) and ease-of-use improvements.

Macs are extremely complex and not simple at all. They are riddled with "file systems", a wide range of "system configurations", etc., etc. Yeah, they are indeed an improvement from windows pcs, in the sense that their hardware is fixed, there is no registry to take care of, many apps try to get around the file system, etc.

But it still is complicated.

Take iOS now. iOS is still in its infancy, but it is clearly headed for a "post-pc" world, a walled DRM garden where you don't have to worry about anything but your apps. Which you just have to "magically" download from the app store, given the price.

That's the future of "PCs". And this point is proven with the latest iteration of the OS X, which brings many of these ideas of the iOS "back to the mac".

IOW, they are trying to make the PCs as closed and as simple to use as consoles or "iPads" are right now, regardless of your / mine wants.