ISPs Finally Abandon The Copyright Alert System (engadget.com) 113
"Major internet providers are ending a four-year-old system in which consumers received 'copyright alerts' when they viewed peer-to-peer pirated content," reports Variety.
An anonymous reader quotes Engadget's update on the Copyright Alert System.
It was supposed to spook pirates by having their internet providers send violation notices, with the threat of penalties like throttling. However, it hasn't exactly panned out. ISPs and media groups have dropped the alert system with an admission that it isn't up to the job. While the program was supposedly successful in "educating" the public on legal music and video options, the MPAA states that it just couldn't handle the "hard-core repeat infringer problem" -- there wasn't much to deter bootleggers. The organizations, which include the RIAA, haven't devised an alternative.
"Surprise: it's hard to stop copyright violators just by asking them," reads their article's tagline, which attributes the failure of the system to naive optimism. "It assumed that most pirates didn't even realize they were violating copyright, and just needed to be shown the error of their ways."
"Surprise: it's hard to stop copyright violators just by asking them," reads their article's tagline, which attributes the failure of the system to naive optimism. "It assumed that most pirates didn't even realize they were violating copyright, and just needed to be shown the error of their ways."
error in whose ways? (Score:5, Interesting)
"It assumed that most pirates didn't even realize they were violating copyright, and just needed to be shown the error of their ways."
Right. So those Jews who tried to avoid concentration camps were merely misguided and should be told their race is so inferior they should welcome extermination? Arguing that an unjust law is not unjust is not that easy when it's you, personally, who paid for its enactment.
We should not dismiss the harm of copyright. It grieviously damages culture -- not just receiving culture as in "freeloading" watchers of a random crap movie, but also creating more works. It's impossible to create a cultural work without building atop of references and conventions built up previously -- it would be totally incomprehensible to any reader. Because of copyright, direct references to any semi-modern works are outright banned, and less direct ones are not banned yet only because the copyright cartel didn't yet bribe^W"campaign donate" appropriate legislation.
Culture is what puts us apart from animals (in the common sense of the word) -- as biologically we are animals with most of the same urge. It's transmission of works that makes humanity. Thus, a crime that hampers this transmission is a crime against humanity itself.
(You might call my stance "extreme", starting with self-Godwining at the start. Don't let the propaganda that "piracy is evil" cloud you.)
Re: error in whose ways? (Score:1)
DMCA NOTICE: You have used the terms "pirate" and "piracy" several times in your post which is in direct violation of the RIAA and MPAA's copyright on the issue of copyright infringement. You may be liable for fines and damages of up to $1,000,000,000,000 and/or imprisonment.
We'll also rub rock salt and bleach in your eyes.
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Whatever copyright is unjust could be argued.
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how dare you compare copyright infringement to concentration camps! WTF!
There's more than one type of crime against humanity. Decrying a second one doesn't make the first any less appalling.
Two more arguments:
Absolute self-centeredness and ignorance (Score:2)
You are seriously equating these two:
A) If you want to listen to Justin Bieber rather than the millions of free songs available on Myspace and elsewhere, please pay your 99 cents share of the cost.
B) Being toward to to death.
Your total and complete lack of any sense of perspective, your absolute self-centeredness, is sickening. Trivializing actual suffering by implying that it's no worse than paying 99 cents for a song (or choosing a different, free, song) is profoundly insulting to those who have actually
Dyac. Tortured, not toward (Score:2)
I've got to start using the Preview feature.
I don't use it because it's an extra click, which is basically the same thing as being in a Nazi labor camp as you starve to death, according to GP.
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If you want to listen to Justin Bieber
In this particular case of "culture", copyright restricting access grants us all a favour.
Your total and complete lack of any sense of perspective, your absolute self-centeredness, is sickening. Trivializing actual suffering by implying that it's no worse than paying 99 cents for a song (or choosing a different, free, song) is profoundly insulting to those who have actually suffered
A single murder is immensely worse than a single act of restricting access to culture. But compare the number of victims a single Auschwitz guard has killed to the number of lost copies that haven't been created because of actions of a single MAFIAA executive -- it's no longer anywhere close to one-to-one. There's so many orders of magnitude difference in counts, that, even though each act of the latter is miniscule,
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I forget the last time a business willingly changed its model rather than simply trying to force its customers to continue to accept the way it's always been.
That doesn't work if your customers have the freedom to switch to an upstart competitor.
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The last one at least still exists. You've never seen a live band at a bar?
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Oh boy, it's another "Work was already paid for" meme.
So, you genius, where does the money for subsequent works come from?
From the actual sales, dickhead. Most people pirating wouldn't have paid for it anyway and only get it because they can or are you on the every download is a lost sale bandwagon?
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Considering that the media industry has been having record years for a while now, and still pays very little taxes, perhaps from their enormous profits?
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Why so extreme? It's not about wanting stuff for free. Piracy is simply an answer to unfair practices that work against customers, such as bad value/money ratio, not having the right to use what you buy however you like, region locking, unwillingness to pay subscription fees, not wanting to share credit card information etc.
Piracy is not new, and the more big corps try to stop it, the worse it becomes. When VHS rentals were a thing people would rather go rent than get a bootleg. Now that's out of the pictur
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https://smile.amazon.com/Iron-... [amazon.com]
I don't recall paying $4 to rent movies at Blockbuster. Especially for a 7 year old movie at this point. The media industry is just plain greedy, if they offered their product without all the stupid delays, and at a reasonable price, the piracy would be much lessened, but instead they milk every movie for all it is worth.
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Why so extreme? It's not about wanting stuff for free. Piracy is simply an answer to unfair practices that work against customers, such as bad value/money ratio, not having the right to use what you buy however you like, region locking, unwillingness to pay subscription fees, not wanting to share credit card information etc.
Or it's just karma. The only reason Hollywood is even a thing is because they wanted to move the studios far out west so they could avoid paying patent royalties to Thomas Edison.
And at the end of the day, good things often come from copying.
I charge for end results, not "work" (Score:2)
Re: unpaid (Score:1)
Re: unpaid (Score:5, Insightful)
People should pay for work, work but historically end results are a good way of judging work, In your example of a fancy chair you judge the quality and quantity of work required to make the chair. Allowing other people to make the chair gives you a comparison and forces continual improvements in either cost or quality. If someone can make the chair better or cheaper than the original creator they should, that is what is best for society.
The problem with patents and copyright is you basically stop other people from making a chair because somebody came up with it first. So they can charge an unfair price up until the point people will just sit on the floor, there is no incentive to improve your product or make production more efficient. If you need any evidence of that look at car keys, to get one cut if it has an immobilizer in it, cost at the lower end $400, You can get an entire new alarm system for less than that, but because the hold a monopoly they can charge, not what they want because you will simply get a new car, or walk but a vastly unfair price.
For movies and electronic devices this is bad, but things like medicine this is down right mass murder, you are basically giving the customer an ultimatum give me all your money or die, oh by the way no guarantees you will live. I understand that it requires money but giving someone the power of life and death over someone in a bargaining situation is not going to end up with a fair deal. What you need to do is say Ok you can have a monopoly for a limited time but you have to prove you are not overcharging, and if it is discovered that you are using creative account practices to over inflate expenses, you will be charge with the crime you are actually guilty of which is mass murder.
Re: paing for work (Score:1)
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The problem with patents and copyright is you basically stop other people from making a chair because somebody came up with it first. So they can charge an unfair price up until the point people will just sit on the floor,
So with patents, most people will just do what they did before you made an invention, until the patent runs out, then they can use it for free. Much better than you either having no incentive to make an invention, or keeping your invention a trade secret kept secrete with lethal force, like before patents.
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Patents at least have a half ways sensible length. 20 years. For a physically device, possibly something that could save a life.
Copyright is author dead + 70 years. Mostly for entertainment material. WTF?
Re:error in whose ways? (Score:5, Insightful)
So, are you volunteering to work for free in return?
You mean, like Debian Developer work and upstream work on a bunch of projects? I believe I got my fair share of unpaid work covered.
Are you fine with clients just tossing your invoice for whatever you do for a living?
A non-advance invoice is a debt; it has been agreed upon beforehand (even if just verbally).
As for works of music/literature/etc, they worked fine -- better -- before the Worshipful Company of Stationers were granted copyright monopoly to limit who can own a printing press. Artists were paid generously, they just didn't get a monopoly afterwards. Grateful patrons paid them to ensure more good work is coming, as an incentive. A monopoly 75/95 years after death isn't exactly going to incentivize that artists to create more works, as he's, you know, dead.
Let's see music I listen to. I don't enjoy any drivel by MPAA/RIAA or their "artists", I listen mostly to symphonic black metal which is a niche genre (I also do +/-1 for every component, so symphonic is on my table too -- but the last time I checked, Mozart and Beethoven were long dead). Even there, musicians get only a small fraction of money for record sales, the portion is far better for concerts and merch such as shirts. Thus, I get the music exclusively via torrents, then patronize the artists some other way. Heck, I've even once put some money in a snail-mail anonymous envelope (many years ago, there are better ways now). I feel I've been skimping lately and should benefit them more, but you still can't accuse me of being a freeloader.
And, a disbanded band doesn't concert/etc anymore, so no incentive is misplaced, while I still enjoy their past work. It's just that to get my money you need to keep doing your part.
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There's major difference of being volunteering and being forced too.
Re:error in whose ways? (Score:5, Insightful)
There's major difference of being volunteering and being forced too.
Most of recipients are naturally freeloaders, and that's expected. When a merchant in medieval Genoa or a partician in ancient Rome sponsored a work of art, the plebs got to see it for free. In ancient Greece, there were even special funds so the poor can be exposed to culture. Some goods are scarce, and those are naturally limited -- during a famine, I wouldn't share my last bread no matter how loud the preachers speak -- but most artwork doesn't get used up just because some enjoy it for free. That statue on the Forum doesn't go away just because that uncultured pleb dared to raise his gaze upon it. Denying people access to an infinitely copyable good -- that's a special kind of evil.
Economics say, if the marginal price of a good is zero, the fair price is zero as well.
Obviously, such goods don't get created for free. Those with a disposable income get to decide what gets created. So instead of enriching the mafia that steals from the artists, go and patronize them directly. As middle-classers, we can decide what culture gets created instead of waiting for a 1-percenter to "trickle down" on us. It's culture that's worth fighting for, those private jets I can do without (even if I wouldn't mind owning one).
For tangible goods, you should get to keep what your produce. But for goods that can be replicated at no cost, why would you care that someone else gets for free what you paid for? You don't get any less of it -- so both you get to keep your piece, and Billy Bob gets a copy.
Quoting MAFIAA's words: "would you download a car?". If I have access to a reliable enough 3D printer, the hell I would! And I don't give a rat's ass about the car makers cartel's lost profits.
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Most of recipients are naturally freeloaders, and that's expected. When a merchant in medieval Genoa or a partician in ancient Rome sponsored a work of art, the plebs got to see it for free. In ancient Greece, there were even special funds so the poor can be exposed to culture. Some goods are scarce, and those are naturally limited -- during a famine, I wouldn't share my last bread no matter how loud the preachers speak -- but most artwork doesn't get used up just because some enjoy it for free.
I'm becoming more and more convinced of this. Two examples. There is a new season of Mystery Science Theater 3000 coming out in a couple of month, fully crowd funded. This is art that people WANTED, and we PAID for it. It wasn't forced down our throats. Another example is my favorite band Killing Joke. One member is an art restorer. One is an active music producer. One lives a no frills life style in Prague. And the last is composer in residence for the European Union. The band is what they do for
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You make a lot of good points. However...
When a merchant in medieval Genoa or a partician in ancient Rome sponsored a work of art, the plebs got to see it for free.
The problem with old patronage systems is that rich people decided what art existed. One might argue that's still the case with publishers and labels running the show, but it was even more extreme in the past. One of the problems with many copyright systems is that they allowed artists to effectively give up their rights to publishers in exchange for printing, promotion, etc. Copyright law does exist to allow invested parties to recoup their initial costs in crea
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A period of 7-10 years made sense in those days, when a work had to be printed and then distributed slowly via horses and sailing ships...
In these days, a work can be distributed instantly worldwide through the internet and yet instead of taking advantage of new technology, publishers are creating artificial barriers to restrict distribution.
And most work becomes abandoned after 2-3 years, at which point there is no legal way to get hold of the work. The copyright holder clearly sees no commercial value in
Re: What's in a name (Score:1)
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I listen mostly to symphonic black metal which is a niche genre
Oh, so one of the most popular highly visible music genres around is a 'niche genre' now? Or is metal music different in 'merica?
Because the charts are filled with symphonic black metal? whatever the fuck that is supposed to be.
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Indeed many of us make our work available for free in the form of open source software. Many more people work for free by donating their time to various charitable causes. People can and do work for free.
Most people feel that some compensation is deserved for hard work, the problem is the extreme greed of many in the industry. Why should someone still be able to earn royalties from some work their grandfather did 100 years ago?
There is also the extreme damage this does to our culture, much of the work being
Copyright Violations have always been... (Score:1)
Copyright violations have ALWAYS BEEN & WILL ALWAYS BE an symptom of something else than what the MPAA/RIAA want to admit. They are caused by either scarcity or there too low of a value proposition. Scarcity is when the user can't obtain a product any other way (such as a rare song, a rare book, etc.), and low value proposition happens when you charge too much for your product compared to what people perceive the value to be.
I bought close to 100x DVD movies over the span of a couple years from Big Lots
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Free means either ad-supported, or it means funded by someone hoping to turn a profit some other way, or as a loss leader for some other product.
You don't get services like Netflix for Free. It's just not possible.
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Free means either ad-supported, or it means funded by someone hoping to turn a profit some other way, or as a loss leader for some other product. You don't get services like Netflix for Free. It's just not possible.
Without copyright we'd have a pot luck gathering of storage and bandwidth through torrents, the only thing you'd need at the top is a razor thin site with magnet links and a tracker with some ratio control. Sure it could never operate at $0 but "a friend of mine" is member on a private tracker with no fees, no ads and you get way, way more donation runs at Wikipedia. Even aside from price it's better than any service you could buy today, without content fees and bandwidth fees you could run "Netflix" on the
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Free means either ad-supported
Ad supported things are not free, they're just requiring a different sort of payment.
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Copyright violations have ALWAYS BEEN & WILL ALWAYS BE an symptom of something else than what the MPAA/RIAA want to admit. They are caused by either scarcity or there too low of a value proposition.
Very much this. Were I live, private downloading is legally tolerated, and I have hand instances were I bought the whole DVD-collection but found it unwatchable because of all the crap they put in there and the bad UI. So I download the hassle-free, good-quality, plays-everywhere "pirated" version in addition. Recently, I have been running more and more into the problem that a legal version was not even available. In that case, I regretfully download the pirated version without compensation to the creators
Letters (Score:2)
Movies. (Score:5, Insightful)
Was looking for a film to watch last night.
(Bear in mind that I pay for everything legitimately. I don't own any music. I buy DVD's or LICENCED online content for everything I watch.
I do this so that I'm rewarding the creators of things I like. I've bought shareware. I've paid for donationware. I've bought some things several times over and bought them for friends.
The point is - I'm one of those rare people who pays for EVERYTHING I use. The vast majority of people I speak to are quite happy not to pay if there's no chance of being caught and will happily use Kodi or downloads or streams or tolerate what their child does, etc.)
I went on Amazon Prime. I didn't fancy anything on the Prime offerings, so I flicked through the "Buy" listings for movies. As there was nothing on Prime, I also loaded up the Google Play Store for movies and did the same on there. I have bought 50% of my online movies on each service, and even rented a couple of times.
I looked through all the recommended, the newly released, etc. and went back as far as I could without hitting anything I liked the look of. Fair enough, personal taste. Then I went through all the cheap movies, all dross and most I'd never heard of. Then I went through categories of movies, Action or Sci-Fi is always a good bet.
About 20 pages in, and a lot of scrolling, on both services the only things that I had any interest in were old 80's action / sci-fi movies. Okay, not a problem. I own a lot of them on DVD, though, but I wanted to watch online. I'm not going to pay a fortune again.
But then the problem hits - once I found a category I was willing to buy from and didn't already own, the prices were a piss-take. GBP10 for a movie from the 80's that's had endless re-runs on TV. 25GBP for a TV series that's on constant loop on multiple TV channels, and that's just the first series. Sorry, but I'm not paying that for an Arnie movie from the 80's, Indiana Jones, James Bond or a series of Friends to flick through. And the stuff I already have on DVD? Same prices. No way am I paying that just to "have it online".
The irony was, I'd have happily laid down the 25GBP for a complete boxset of something, or 10GBP for a new movie, or a few GBP for one of the old dross (Indiana Jones, etc.). But I couldn't justify it to myself to pay those kinds of prices.
In the end, after about an hour of scrolling through both stores, I bought nothing. My entertainment time was gone, my funds weren't going to be spent like that, and that's with me LOOKING to buy.
The other annoying part? You can't buy certain things anywhere. I love an old TV series called The Good Life (Good Neighbours in the US). I have it on DVD. I'd quite like it online too, to watch when I'm out on holiday etc. I bought series 1 & 2 online and - despite being from the 70's - series 3 is nowhere to be seen. Literally, nothing. I've been checking almost every month for years now.
Try and get Aliens:Special Edition. Half the online streaming stores just don't carry it at all, or don't mention if it is SE or not.
And then there are the TV series from years ago that still have never made it to DVD or online at all. The most annoying ones are like above - someone converted one series and then said fuck it and left it at that.
I have no surprise at all when I find out that people pirate or stream or whatever. They just want to watch the fucking movie that they like. But you can't. And even when you can, the price is ludicrous.
Because I won't pirate, this gives me one option. Stop watching. Even the old stuff. Stop buying.
The movie and TV industries are killing themselves. I have no sympathy for them.
Also, we TOLD THEM THIS several decades ago when they started on the pointless crusade against piracy. If they'd listened then, maybe they wouldn't have wasted money on stupid DRM schemes, they'd have not lost public favour, and they might have been able to try things like streaming, downloads,
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Sounds like you need to get to work using Handbrake to re-encode your videos, then carry around the results on your own private storage. It'll also save your wireless data quotas and can give you a better picture than streaming. But you'll need to find an RPC1 DVD drive or firmware patch first, because the MPAA conspired with the optical drive industry to make drives fail to operate properly if there's the tiniest hint that you're trying to rip the contents of discs that you purchased, even to use only for
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Nope. I have the technical capability.
I refuse to do so, just to watch a movie. That's hours of pissing about just to watch a movie at some point in the future.
It's easier to just stop watching movies, which will also be a lot cheaper in the long run.
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Nope. I have the technical capability.
I refuse to do so, just to watch a movie. That's hours of pissing about just to watch a movie at some point in the future.
It's easier to just stop watching movies, which will also be a lot cheaper in the long run.
In the time it takes you to watch a movie, you could be ripping three more. If your only remedy is to stop watching, I don't even know why the hell you spent the time pissing about drafting your original post.
Oh, and you probably should stop talking about the "next" generation. Between the laziness and the bitching, you've certainly morphed into a lazy, spoiled Millennial in the worst possible way. Might as well sell your DVD collection, since pulling one out of the closet to put in a player is now too m
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1) What you propose is a legal grey area.
2) How does it solve the problem or portability? I would have to spend MONTHS of time converting my collection, defeating DRM, and storing it, and then carry around a several-Tb drive everywhere I go.
3) I have the DVD's. I continue to watch them, as normal. What I'm NOT doing it giving the movie industry a penny by doing so - most of those DVDs were second-hand and it won't be long before DVDs don't exist, like VHS before it.
When I'm quite happy - and trying - to
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So run your own streaming server and keep everything at home. Plex is fairly easy to setup.
It's not too hard to automate ripping DVD's so the only user intervention required is swapping discs. Then you can use software like FileBot [filebot.net] to organise everything consistently. But getting episode numbers of TV show DVD's right is a fiddly process.
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Sounds like you need to get to work using Handbrake to re-encode your videos, then carry around the results on your own private storage.
Or, you know, just download a copy from someone else who already did that. If you're making a copy from the DVD to the hard drive (and several more copies in the process of conversion), then you're already violating copyright law. Why go the extra mile?
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Just come to the dark side - everything searchable in one place, high quality, no DRM so it works on all of your devices. If you lose it in the future you won't be upset.
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I just take the MPAA/RIAA up on their insistence that we're buying a license, not purchasing a product. Any song or movie I've already paid for, I just download it from a pirate site. After all, I already bought a license (on record, tape, CD, VHS, DVD, or Blu-Ray).
Re: Movies. (Score:2)
The one thing that I consider to be the biggest problem is the fact that simply repackaging a work is enough to consider it a new work, at least in the sense of licensing.
The second thing that seems to be the MPAA/RIAA don't care about customer convenience.
I've proposed it in the past, but was shot down by Slashdot because it would cost truck drivers their jerbs(!!!1!!).
What we need is a way to buy a license for a work that isn't attached to a specific physical or digital download. A "pirate license", per s
You will never get the money of the freeloaders (Score:5, Insightful)
They will simply do without your content if you manage to stop them. They will never, ever pay for it. And, surprise!, it is actually much worse for you to have them not watch your stuff at all than to have them watch it for free. But it takes some minimal understanding of how a market works and how word-of-mouth works. You do not have that.
One exception: All the really, really bad "AAA" stuff would profit from people not downloading it early, because then people would go to cinemas unaware how their time will get wasted and their money essentially stolen. But since that morally amounts to fraud on your side, I cannot find it in me to see that any injustice is done to you there.
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One exception: All the really, really bad "AAA" stuff would profit from people not downloading it early, because then people would go to cinemas unaware how their time will get wasted and their money essentially stolen. But since that morally amounts to fraud on your side, I cannot find it in me to see that any injustice is done to you there.
That, my friend, is the actual reason for "anti-piracy" laws: if people have access to good quality movies (or, more generally, culture), why would they watch marketed crap?
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To content owners (Score:2)
Well.. (Score:2)
One reason for piracy (Score:2)
I believe in making a good-faith effort to buy what I want fair and square. But occasionally, I run into silly geographical restrictions on purchasing digital content, generally movies and books. I want to see a given movie that is available online but not in the US, am willing to pay a rental on standard sources, but they won't let me make this purchase.
I then take the easy way out and download it from a pirate site. Sorry, asshole middlemen.
Rrrrr! (Score:2)
"It assumed that most pirates didn't even realize they were violating copyright, and just needed to be shown the error of their ways."
I'm sure that is true, what with the pirates being so busy stealing boats and robbing people at sea and all, they probably had no idea they were infringing on copyright.
Shame on Slash Dot, Again (Score:1)
But that wouldn't bring out the intellectual property whiners, we've already seen today's story about how Trump is destroying the galaxy, we've already seen the story about solar energy jobs, and a Windows bashing story, an
Windows...? (Score:1)