The SOPA Bill [YOU MUST READ THIS! NOW! DONT IGNORE THIS!]

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VikingBoyBilly
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Post by VikingBoyBilly »

Well said Galaxie. That's exactly the reason I pirated Duke Nukem Forever. I didn't believe Gearbox deserved my money for what would probably be the crappy product they rushed out in response to 3Drealms "taking forever." But I was curious. Lo and behold.... it actually wasn't THAT bad, but it wasn't good by a long shot.

If I was absolutely wowed by it, I would have bought it to have the multiplayer features enabled, but I didn't care enough about it to have multiplayer, so I didn't buy it. And it's so depressing that you can see all the great elements 3Drealmz poured into the game, and it's clear that gearbox ruined it with their level designs.

ON THE OTHER HAND, I had to pirate Earthbound Zero and Mother 3 with translation hacks because, unless I wanted to play it in Japanese, there was NO way I could possibly ever play it. I guess it would have been morally correct to import the japanese games and then download them though... sigh, I feel dirty now.
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Post by KeenEmpire »

Lava89 wrote:I find the idea of "more acceptable theft" ironic. The term "rich" or the idea of wealth is very relative...exactly how rich does someone have to be until stealing from them is ok?
"ok" is somewhat loaded language for looking at such things. The way I see it, as they become richer, it becomes asymptotically oker. After all, if you have 900 trillion and someone swipes a few pennies, it's not going to be something you actually notice (your personal moral indignation aside).
Lava89 wrote:Taxes are a different story
I never said they were the same story (that's a whole different argument). What I was trying to say, is that the same reasoning for increased taxation applies as to why stealing becomes more/less wrong. As someone gets richer, they can afford to have more taken from them (without such things as significant loss in lifestyle). Clearly, taking [some small] x amount from them would not be nearly as much as an issue as taking x amount from a family that only makes 2x a year. A lot of people would contend that the latter is much more wrong.
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Post by KeenEmpire »

Galaxieretter wrote:It's easy to justify what many do as "not pirating." Arguing over the validaty of if you are actually stealing or not is a lie. YOU ARE STEALING
Period. That's the simple fact of what it is. If you argue, if you make loops in logic to justify what you are doing, then fool yourself that you aren't actually stealing, you still are; no matter how you slice it.
Nope.

When you do this stuff, you are infringing on a copyright. You are, however, not stealing (at least not according to the laws of the US and UK).

You can call it "murder" if you want. That doesn't make it so.

---

On a less technical note, I don't get how the things you said line up together. You said you realized the only reason you were pirating software was because it sucks so much you were never gonna buy it. I don't get why this revelation made you stop downloading. I mean, if anything, you usually hear stories about the opposite (X realizes that software sucks too much to pay for, and so he does download).
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VikingBoyBilly
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Post by VikingBoyBilly »

It's kind of tricky to define. The person providing the pirated product didn't steal it. They bought it. By making copies and distributing it to others for free, those people are stealing. But isn't the pirater partly responsible for enabling them to steal? If the pirates charge money to distribute it, i'd say that counts as stealing possible profits from the owner.
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Post by KeenEmpire »

VikingBoyBilly wrote:By making copies and distributing it to others for free, those people are stealing.
If X makes a copy of your car, did he steal your car? No; the worst he could be said to have done is infringe on someone's copyright (specifically, of the car's design).

This is, of course, a non-argument. However, it might allow you to better understand the rationale behind the actual legal distinction between theft and copyright infringement. Theft requires property to have actually been deprived. Making copies does no such thing.
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Post by Paramultart »

Small victory over SOPA.

http://www.sopastrike.com/numbers

But the fight doesn't stop here. The senate returns on Monday to vote for PIPA, so tell everyone you know to call their senators and keep up the good fight.
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Post by Commander Spleen »

If X makes a copy of your car, did he steal your car? No; the worst he could be said to have done is infringe on someone's copyright (specifically, of the car's design).
Also, because of this the figures that the copyright owners put forward as their loss of income due to piracy are grossly overestimated. The majority of people who copied the content would not have gone out and purchased a legitimate copy if they didn't have access to an illegal copy.

People selling pirated copies is another story, and is what they should be cracking down on. Censoring the internet won't do anything to stop that.
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Post by RoboBlue »

Dunno if this has been mentioned before, but software piracy isn't theft, it's the elimination of a potential sale. The difference is, if the person who seeks out and downloads a piece of pirated software had no prior intent of buying it, he was never a customer and no immediate damages can be claimed.

Although it's possible to claim that some sort of general damage has been done to the industry as a whole, due to popular knowledge of piracy, to my knowledge most games/movies/music titles that have seen lost revenue tend to fall under "regrettable purchases", things that people had intended to buy but decided not to after experiencing them. This means that, while I admit that it may be wrong and unfair for companies to lose money on sales due to software piracy, it's also wrong and unfair for me to lose 60 dollars on a video game because I didn't do research before removing the shrinkwrap.
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Post by Galaxieretter »

KeenEmpire wrote:When you do this stuff, you are infringing on a copyright. You are, however, not stealing (at least not according to the laws of the US and UK).
Citation needed.

:disguised

No but seriously though...
KeenEmpire wrote:On a less technical note, I don't get how the things you said line up together. You said you realized the only reason you were pirating software was because it sucks so much you were never gonna buy it. I don't get why this revelation made you stop downloading. I mean, if anything, you usually hear stories about the opposite (X realizes that software sucks too much to pay for, and so he does download).
Because it was such a waste of time, bandwidth and hard drive space for something I had no interest in what so ever. Yet, as the whole point of the lower half of the statement in my previous post was, I WAS BREAKING THE LAW.
I said so right in my post. I thought I made that clear.
KeenEmpire wrote:
VikingBoyBilly wrote:By making copies and distributing it to others for free, those people are stealing.
If X makes a copy of your car, did he steal your car? No; the worst he could be said to have done is infringe on someone's copyright (specifically, of the car's design).
Yes... actually... you did.

This has fucl nothing to do with copyright and everything to do with a patent. Copyright is for intellectual media. Patents are for physical devices.

Yes... if you copy someone else's patent, you are stealing.
KeenEmpire wrote:This is, of course, a non-argument. However, it might allow you to better understand the rationale behind the actual legal distinction between theft and copyright infringement. Theft requires property to have actually been deprived. Making copies does no such thing.
When a manufacturer creates 500,000 copies of one media CD, making an unauthorised copy of that officially printed, burned and packaged media does deprive the producers of the value of the originals.

No matter how you justify it, you are stealing.

Just because you don't want to admit you are stealing someone else's profit doesn't mean you aren't.

Just because you don't want to admit someone deserves the profit, doesn't mean that they don't.
RoboBlue wrote:-it's also wrong and unfair for me to lose 60 dollars on a video game because I didn't do research before removing the shrinkwrap.
No offence but, that's your own, damn, fault.



What I'm saying is, it doesn't matter if those people are justifying what they do or not. It is still criminal activity. It should not be done. If you don't care enough to purchase it, you should not pirate it as it is still a crime, no matter how you justify doing so.

Right now, the issue is, no one is getting any money from the whole ordeal, and that's what is pissing the industries off the most. If there WAS a "pirate dealer" elite h@x0R21 on a street corner, dealing out jewel cases of the hottest, newest releases, then yes, there would be a true enemy to take down. As it stands, the industry is so full of themselves, they don't want to admit their sound quality is awful, horribly compressed and the media its self is vague, generic and lossy.

That no one wants it and no one cares.

But that still does not justify anything. What "they" should be cracking down here, as it is the issue, is people, the users of the computer, who break the law using their devices, if they make a profit or not from their illegal activity.
NOT going after user-dependent content delivery HTML sites.

Go after the users who are violating the laws. This needs a restructuring of the internet as a whole. As it stands, if someone uploads data to a website, they cannot be directly traced, may be easily masked and proxied, the criminal investigation authorities have no way to accurately acertain what data is being sent at any given time from any single computer on a network to any other I.P. address using a private companies' telecommunication avenues.
For this to be rectified, policing of the internet needs to occur by the state, not from media companies or meaningless laws.

No stupid ID card garg

no cencoring HTML traffic

no suing.

There needs to be a legitimate non-intrusive way of policing the, now privatized, communication avenues for illicit activity, which at this time, is impossible.

Individuals need to start to be held accountable for their crimes committed using their computer devices and terminals. As I hinted at, "copyright infringement" is only just the toe of the giant which is internet media cyber-crime.
Whatever form that media is. This includes credit card fraud, hacking, DDoSing, social-internet harassment, web-cam hacking, software cracking and, AND illegal image material including, but not limited to, crime scene and accident scene police video and photo-documentation leaks, vulgar death imagery, treason by uploading crucial media if textual, photographic, diagram or video of military or nationalistic security information which might negate, hamper or otherwise compromise troop deployment or national security. *COUGH=WIKI-LEAKS=COUGH*


THIS is the issue at hand here, ladies and gentlemen, which is general internet-infrastructure security, NOT some 13 year old downloading Seether and listening to it after school. (Metalocalypse comes to mind.)

As it stands, the internet is far too easy to commit felonious acts via digital communication devices, and have it go on undetected. THIS needs addressed and stopped where it starts, not a website but by the people using them.

We already have all the laws in place, we just need a way to have them enforced.
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Post by RoboBlue »

Galaxieretter wrote:No offence but, that's your own, damn, fault.
It's my fault that I was maliciously scammed into buying an inferior product, and then refused a return because they can conveniently accuse me of opening the product solely to make an illegal copy?
Galaxieretter wrote:What I'm saying is, it doesn't matter if those people are justifying what they do or not. It is still criminal activity. It should not be done. If you don't care enough to purchase it, you should not pirate it as it is still a crime, no matter how you justify doing so.
If the issue really boils down to "pirates are breaking the law" rather than "piracy is bad because it hurts people", that's a pretty weak defense.
Galaxieretter wrote:Go after the users who are violating the laws. This needs a restructuring of the internet as a whole. As it stands, if someone uploads data to a website, they cannot be directly traced, may be easily masked and proxied, the criminal investigation authorities have no way to accurately acertain what data is being sent at any given time from any single computer on a network to any other I.P. address using a private companies' telecommunication avenues.
For this to be rectified, policing of the internet needs to occur by the state, not from media companies or meaningless laws.
What you're suggesting implies branding every internet user as guilty until proven innocent.
Galaxieretter wrote:no suing.

There needs to be a legitimate non-intrusive way of policing the, now privatized, communication avenues for illicit activity, which at this time, is impossible.
Modern copyright law intrudes upon our lives by its very nature, and if we're going to keep these laws, someone is going to have to pay the massive and unrealistic fees for enforcement. Most of us don't own intellectual property, so there's no justification for common tax dollars to be spent defending the private property of a select few. The only fair ways to pay for enforcement are the current method (forcing companies to sue individual offenders) or new taxes exclusive to copyright and patent holders.
Galaxieretter wrote:Individuals need to start to be held accountable for their crimes committed using their computer devices and terminals. As I hinted at, "copyright infringement" is only just the toe of the giant which is internet media cyber-crime.
Whatever form that media is. This includes credit card fraud, hacking, DDoSing, social-internet harassment, web-cam hacking, software cracking and, AND illegal image material including, but not limited to, crime scene and accident scene police video and photo-documentation leaks, vulgar death imagery, treason by uploading crucial media if textual, photographic, diagram or video of military or nationalistic security information which might negate, hamper or otherwise compromise troop deployment or national security. *COUGH=WIKI-LEAKS=COUGH*
Grouping software piracy with wikileaks is about as appropriate as comparing VHS to Jack the Ripper.
Galaxieretter wrote:As it stands, the internet is far too easy to commit felonious acts via digital communication devices, and have it go on undetected. THIS needs addressed and stopped where it starts, not a website but by the people using them.
Are you also willing to put a camera in every home in America? It's not hard to commit crimes in real life either, and I'd say a majority of people commit several crimes a day without even realizing or caring.
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Post by KeenEmpire »

Galaxieretter wrote:Yes... if you copy someone else's patent, you are stealing.
Galaxieretter wrote:No matter how you justify it, you are stealing.
Nope. You are infringing (on patents or copyrights). Laws concerning theft cannot even be applied to such infringement.

Actually, I recently came upon a funny argument to demonstrate this. If copyright/patent infringement were theft, then infringers would be reported to the police and tried under criminal law. The prosecutors would then try to find him guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, and if found guilty he would be liable for the cost of the item (as opposed to, say, the tens or hundreds of thousands under copyright infringement).

As for an actual citation about this, see the Supreme Court judgment in question, particularly part III. In particular, laws against theft were ruled inapplicable (and all charges were dropped save copyright infringement).
Galaxieretter wrote:What I'm saying is, it doesn't matter if those people are justifying what they do or not. It is still criminal activity.
NO! Mere infringement of copyright (i.e. most of the crap that goes on) is NOT a criminal matter, but rather a civil one. In contrast, commercial copyright infringement (i.e. what megaupload is currently being charged with) is a criminal matter - this is why the FBI has charged them and had them locked up.
Galaxieretter wrote:Just because you don't want to admit you are stealing someone else's profit doesn't mean you aren't.
Just think for a second: if business X enters the market to compete with business Y, is X "stealing" Y's profit? If you provide negative advertising about Y's service, are you then "stealing" their profit? There are tons of ways that Y could lose profit, but short of stuff being taken away from their premises, these do not count as actual theft.
Galaxieretter wrote:Because it was such a waste of time, bandwidth and hard drive space for something I had no interest in what so ever. Yet, as the whole point of the lower half of the statement in my previous post was, I WAS BREAKING THE LAW.
I said so right in my post. I thought I made that clear.
The impression I'd gotten from your post, however, did not sound like you stopped because you realized you were breaking the law; rather, it sounded like you knew the whole time and only stopped because you got bored. Fine by me (who am I to judge?), but I'm confused as to how you expect to sway others with this rationale.
Galaxieretter wrote:This needs a restructuring of the internet as a whole. As it stands, if someone uploads data to a website, they cannot be directly traced, may be easily masked and proxied, the criminal investigation authorities have no way to accurately acertain what data is being sent at any given time from any single computer on a network to any other I.P. address using a private companies' telecommunication avenues.
For this to be rectified, policing of the internet needs to occur by the state, not from media companies or meaningless laws.
Sure you can stop all copyright infringement by policing all data, just as you can probably stop all crime by wiretapping every phone and bugging every house. This is not, however, generally considered an acceptable solution.
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Post by Lava89 »

RoboBlue wrote:Dunno if this has been mentioned before, but software piracy isn't theft, it's the elimination of a potential sale.
That's actually how this latest debate started, when I responded to the "don't feel bad about pirating from rich guys" pic.
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Post by Keening_Product »

Would the Keen mods be in breach of SOPA/PIPA? They have the implied approval of Tom Hall and John Romero but there is no formal permission granted from iD software.

Same goes for this forum with its use Keen character images.

More generally, would the blocking of a site require a complaint or would the US copyright/justice departments just consider this to be in violation without an objection being raised?
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Post by tulip »

The whole SOPA stuff isn't through yet, luckily. What I really fear is when it finally gets through. It may be an American law, but Germany will seize every opportunity to cut freedom were it can, plus it's always following the US (except into war in some cases) so, bottom line I thing when the US gets the law running, we Germans won't even be informed when the same law is instated over here too, we'll only notice when some stuff is blocked.
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Post by Keening_Product »

tulip wrote:but Germany will seize every opportunity to cut freedom were it can
I think the US censor could also pull sites off for the world in a non-political way; Sites are almost guaranteed to close if they lose the US traffic they rely on for revenue.
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