White House wants new copyright laws.

[aurik]

Does it? If I have legally recorded a performance, I can play it back at any time (timeshifting), I can play it back at any place as long as it isn't a public exhibition. I can play it back with my friend watching. I don't even have to be there to watch it with him. So should I be able to play it back at my friends place with him watching by delivering the recording over the internet? That's essentially the relationship you are forming when you stream video.

The line can get pretty fuzzy.



Also re: wiretapping, they aren't going to start wiretapping people for copyright infringement. They may use it as an excuse to wiretap somebody they already want to wiretap for other reasons though. No guarantees it won't be found unconstitutional though.

[Petitssk]

I was hoping for steps to be taken regarding this matter, but not exactly in this kind of way.

Those guys seem to be stuck on old values and are unable to adapt (then again, so am I); this problem needs a compromise, not forceful action.
Of course, almost nothing they can do to come up with a compromise will achieve anything as long as the alternative is basically media for free, but it will certainly achieve more than scare-tactics.

Personally, I'm having a really hard time wrapping my mind around the fact that the consensus seems to be something along the lines of "downloading is fine as long as I wouldn't have bought it in the first place", but if that's the kind of moral the new technology has gotten into the heads of most of the population, then what can you do? I'd love it if someone could just put an end to piracy of all kinds, but that's not going to happen, so why be unrealistic?

If anything, the inability to consider the points of the respective other side of both parties involved here, government (companies, whatever) and pirates alike has allowed this to drag on for so long. Of course, you see pirates claiming that they're trying to "make a point by downloading overpriced media", but half, if not more, of them only want "free shit" anyway.
Then again, governments and companies are the only ones who have the means to come up with a solution anyway (I certainly don't see pirates protesting on the streets for their rights), but I wonder how inclined they actually feel to reach out to the few pirates really trying to make a point, the ones that are trying to find a compromise, if the rest are trying to spit them in the face? Also, there's money to be made, which is probably a bit of an incentive as well.

I really don't see this ending anytime soon, sucks. I hate piracy, I am stuck with old values and cannot get rid of them to save my life, but this conflict is ridiculous, both sides have their points.

[notorious bum]

What a generous corporate apologist, I hope you get paid to be so supportive of their unfounded fantasy legislation.

Someone find me one of those pretty charts that show how much these self-governing dinosaur conglomerates STILL pull in every year, despite increased piracy. This is old textbook fearmongering that will lead to zero impact on the market, yet its the only play out of their book that they know how to use lol

Album sales not quite what they used to be? People are purchasing singles exclusively now by a majority because album quality is always rushed, autotuned, irrelevant garbage.

MPAA bitching about piracy??? How does one suffer when they have the capacity to increase ticket prices and alienate theater-goers with forcefed 3D movies that add very little to the experience, but increase budgets? Do you not know there are benefits of piracy? It can make a shitty movie bomb harder and it can make a good movie go into legendary status(hi, I am legend, Dark Knight, Avatar) with accelerated amounts of buzz, although record amounts of piracy. Weird how that works.

Go research what happened when cassettes and VHS tapes were popularized. Come back later to preach why pirates are criminals.

[Zeb]

Who cares about movies and music. It's all about streaming the sports games in the black out zones. =/

Oh and fuck this shit to be raging about. Why is there no discussion on the US paying off Pakistan to get our CIA contractor back who was charged with murder?

[Callisto]

Album sales not quite what they used to be? People are purchasing singles exclusively now by a majority because album quality is always rushed, autotuned, irrelevant garbage.

MPAA bitching about piracy??? How does one suffer when they have the capacity to increase ticket prices and alienate theater-goers with forcefed 3D movies that add very little to the experience, but increase budgets? Do you not know there are benefits of piracy? It can make a shitty movie bomb harder and it can make a good movie go into legendary status(hi, I am legend, Dark Knight, Avatar) with accelerated amounts of buzz, although record amounts of piracy. Weird how that works.

Thisssss. The major, major issue is that consumers are being absolutely drowned in a deluge of available media from every possible angle, and a large majority of it is incredibly mediocre at best. You know what would save the motion picture industry more money than curbing piracy? Stop making billion-dollar mass-produced turds that noone wants to see.

Like others have said, if I like a certain media, I pay for it. I am damned sure not going to pay for a physical copy of a CD without knowing that more than one song on it is any good after the number of absolute pieces of shit I shelled out $20 for a decade ago because it had one good song on the radio. I'm not going to spend $15 fucking dollars(are you fucking insane?) at the theater or $30 for a blu-ray when all I have to go on is a trailer that only proves that they managed to edit together 90 seconds of footage that makes the movie appear to not suck.

Until the entertainment industry sets some reasonable prices or stops churning out 36 shitty pixar movies a year, fuck that noise.

[Petitssk]

What a generous corporate apologist, I hope you get paid to be so supportive of their unfounded fantasy legislation.

Someone find me one of those pretty charts that show how much these self-governing dinosaur conglomerates STILL pull in every year, despite increased piracy. This is old textbook fearmongering that will lead to zero impact on the market, yet its the only play out of their book that they know how to use lol

Album sales not quite what they used to be? People are purchasing singles exclusively now by a majority because album quality is always rushed, autotuned, irrelevant garbage.

MPAA bitching about piracy??? How does one suffer when they have the capacity to increase ticket prices and alienate theater-goers with forcefed 3D movies that add very little to the experience, but increase budgets? Do you not know there are benefits of piracy? It can make a shitty movie bomb harder and it can make a good movie go into legendary status(hi, I am legend, Dark Knight, Avatar) with accelerated amounts of buzz, although record amounts of piracy. Weird how that works.

Go research what happened when cassettes and VHS tapes were popularized. Come back later to preach why pirates are criminals.

Sorry for asking, but, are you reffering to me?

[Plow]

all you guys that think pirating is so awesome should move to somalia imo

[Norellicus]

I Am Legend was an atrocious abomination of the book to which it owes its namesake and I should come over there and cut you for even mentioning it in the same breath as Dark Knight

[Shibo]

To me, piracy is not a national concern, especially that of which the government thinks they need to rub their dirty fucking nose into. I understand why businesses are concerned about piracy, but I do not think it is directly effecting the profits that could / are being made by the companies that hold said copyright.

To be honest, if I was unable to download music and movies for free, I would simply have less music and less movies. Piracy is rarely a direct line of impact on the industries when it comes to their profits. Yea, I am sure there are a few cases where someone really wants something, and instead simply downloads it for free, but I do not think that it is even a fraction of the degree in which people claim it to be.

On another note, if companies would stop putting so much extra shit on movies and music, people wouldn't be so inclined to pirate as well. Such as DRMs on music, all the fucking shit they put on movies that are unskippable before you can even get to the movie, and so on.

I think they are delusional if they think they can really impact the giant community that partakes in pirating the various medias. Most of the sources for pirating are hosted in other countries anyways.

[Plow]

I seriously always wonder as piracy discussions go on if the pro-piracy arguments can get any more lazy and retarded.

Then I can never decide if they actually did get dumber or not as people repeat the same retarded shit for 15 years.

[Valisk]

Come back later to preach why pirates are criminals.

Regardless of your opinion, it's still a crime that is being clarified and further "enforced." I don't mind vigilantes killing criminals to clean up the streets but that doesn't mean they should be exempt from the law because of what I feel. This topic isn't going to get much "support" on an internet forum because 99% of us illegaly download and stream everyday. So not many people here are going to give this issue some actual thought without passion or prejudice.

Is it fair to recieve all this "intellectual property" free of charge? No. We are making out like a bandit with all the [illegal] free entertainment available on the internet. Just because it's easily accessible, doesn't make it okay to indulge. Just because I leave my car door unlocked, doesn't mean it's ok to steal what's inside.

[Plow]

"You wouldn't download a car"

Except 99.999999% of the people would do it in a heartbeat if they could keep it and use it whenever they want with about a 1 in a billion chance of getting caught.

The fact of the matter is that people will do whatever they can get away with, and all the rage towards the mpaa/ria/government intervention is absolutely, 100%, without a doubt, because it's threatening their ability to get away with shit.

[Qalbert]

I think the biggest joke about this is slapping a federal felony charge on this. Really? So much for keeping this a civil matter, which it what should be.

EDIT: Ladies and gentlemen, you lost your right to vote for streaming My Little Pony.

Worth it.

[Shibo]

Just because I leave my car door unlocked, doesn't mean it's ok to steal what's inside.

Piracy should not be compared with a direct line of loss. These comparisons are fucking horrible and companies that hold copyrights have been using them for years. Downloaded song x does not mean that the company loses value of song x. They are only losing the (slim) potential that the "customer" could have bought song x. Piracy =/= stealing.

Companies need to get with the times though. Look at Steam for example, they have implemented a way in which to prevent copyright infringement and "stealing" of games to play, but have also made them available at a viable price. The reason why I don't want to download a song for 1.30 or $1 is because most songs aren't worth that.

[Plow]

Piracy should not be compared with a direct line of loss. These comparisons are fucking horrible and companies that hold copyrights have been using them for years. Downloaded song x does not mean that the company loses value of song x. They are only losing the (slim) potential that the "customer" could have bought song x. Piracy =/= stealing.

Companies need to get with the times though. Look at Steam for example, they have implemented a way in which to prevent copyright infringement and "stealing" of games to play, but have also made them available at a viable price. The reason why I don't want to download a song for 1.30 or $1 is because most songs aren't worth that.

That last part is almost a viable argument when you consider a lot of places you pay that dollar for extremely restrictive rights to listen to the song in pretty specific scenarios.

But now that you can get tons of music for that price (or less) with absolutely no DRM whatsoever, so that you can put it on as many cd's/computers/ipods/etc as you like, even that is a completely ridiculous argument.

You can get like 1/4 as much gas now as you could when Nevermind came out for the same price, and people are bitching constantly that cd's have gone from 10-11 to 12-13 bucks in that same time span.


The shit about a direct line of loss was played out 10+ years ago, you're no less retarded for saying so-and-so would never have bought X if they couldn't get it for free than anyone on the other side is for saying they definitely would have.

[Clash Perez]

Heaven forbid the music and film industries have to adapt to the 21st century. Newspapers are doing it without screaming, "OMG NEWS IS FREE ON THE INTERNET! RELEASE THE HOUNDS!!!1"

Shit changes. Evolve or die.

Spoiler: show

Obligatoryhttp://turbo.inquisitr.com/wp-conten...oad-a-bear.png

[Khajit]

Fuckers took away my Pandora a few years ago and now they pull this shite on me? Also fuck region coding on the internet...

[Kerberoz]

I don't understand the point of arguing about the morality of piracy. Why does it even matter if it's "right" or "wrong"? Must be cognitive dissonance. I'm sleeping just fine, either way. Consequences (direct or indirect) are all that really matter, and deep down everyone knows this.

[Khamsin]

The internet is bigger than any one country, so unless they go all egypt on us (or all what-the-rest-of-the-world-does-to-china), I doubt the free-stuff-on-the-internet era will ever end. Most likely scenario is that corporations come up with ways to cope with it, and either capitalize on it or reduce their losses by it. Alter their business models, that sort of thing.

Either that, or they'll just continually change up their DRM methods just enough to keep ahead of the general public year after year, accepting their losses with the savvy types, and milk what they can without really fixing anything.

But I just have this suspicion that if we (in the USA, for example) ever hit a time when we couldn't get free porn, but in, say Sweden, you could... then everyone would just move to Sweden and it'd become the new world superpower that everyone hates but wants to live in. All because of porn. In fact, I suspect that's what really pissed people off in Egypt. Not loss of internet, or a corrupt government, but loss of porn.

[Ashmada]

I've downloaded music, but I'm not going to delude myself and say that I'm not breaking copyright laws and that piracy doesn't hurt anyone. Widespread acceptance of a crime doesn't negate the harm it does or the fact it is a crime.

Consumers have to understand that there are costs that have to be paid for and artists deserve compensation for their work. Not to say that the industry's compensation compared to artist compensation is fair or that they don't make a killing being the middle man, but the TV/Movie/Music industry could end up like the publishing industry soon.

That's not the point, though. 'course piracy is illegal.
But don't you think they're being a bit extreme about going after it?
Curtailling liberties and privacy to save lives (wiretapping suspected terrorists), I'm fine with... curtailling liberties and privacy to save Hollywood/RIAA money, not so much.

Even if you equate piracy to theft (which is debatable and has been debated in this very thread), you can't wiretap on theft charges.
THAT is the point. They're equating piracy not to theft, but terrorism and espionage! If that's not going too far, I don't know what is.


It's not even the US alone, all western countries have gone crazy on piracy. Why? Lobbying. The RIAA and film industry are huge lobbies, they probably inject more money in lobbying than they lose from piracy, tbh.

They're experts playing the martyr. They make you (well, us; but it won't be long for you) pay a tax on all data storage devices (HDDs, SSDs but also CDs/DVDs), then they turn around and whine about those evil pirates.
"Punish those evil evil pirate-terrorists, but allow us to make everyone pay a tax on the mere assumption that they'll pirate anyway!"
Piracy is a godsend for them. It allows them to pass any inane law in a number of countries just by waving the "evil evil pirates that bully us" flag to any uneducated and/or bought politicians.

I Am Legend was an atrocious abomination of the book to which it owes its namesake and I should come over there and cut you for even mentioning it in the same breath as Dark Knight

He also mentionned Pocahontas in space/Dance with the smurfs in that same breath; that's a lot worse.

But anyway, I do agree with his overall point: piracy does have the positive (for the consumer and the artists, but not for the middle-men) impact of enforcing better content.
Instead of being held at gunpoint by moviemakers and music majors to consume mediocre crap, we can help make that shit bomb.
The Dark Knight would never have been funded (or any of the Nolan movies) without piracy. What would be the point when you can get Michael Bay to make some overbudgetted turd again and engross the profits anyway? Why take a risk when you don't have to?


By the way: I'm not a pirate. I buy my CDs. I wait for most movies to be on television/go to the cinema for those I don't want to wait for (I don't really buy DVDs, but I don't download them either).
I buy my games, barring abandoware.
Doesn't mean I want principles like the presumption of innocence fouled by mere corporate interest or that I'll swallow the BS the RIAA and movie industry feed us.


Oh, and just for fun, ironing tiem:

all you guys that think pirating is so awesome should move to somalia imo

I seriously always wonder as piracy discussions go on if the pro-piracy arguments can get any more lazy and retarded.