SOPA & ACTA Page 6

Started by The Void January 17th, 2012 7:15 AM
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Should the SOPA Bill be passed?

BeliVuk

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[SIZE="5"]

Just when you thought you were safe, at least for a moment.

'Nuff said.
God damn f....ing EUSSR.


Anyone know where I can get bombs big enough to blow up Rosenbad and the Vredespaleis?


Sorry about my crap grammar, I'm to lazy to fix it.

Mr. X

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The U.S government is full of douchebags, including your saviours Obama and Ron Paul.


How can the U.S government arrest a guy in New Zealand and block international traffic to a website?!
He was arrested for copyright violations due to having a number of his sites servers on U.S territory. If he didn't have servers in the U.S then he couldn't have been touched by the U.S government. He was arrested in NZ due to extradition treaties we have with them.

He knew that they were after him. Had he removed the U.S servers then he couldn't have been touched. Had he moved to another country that doesn;t have a extradition treaty with us, he would have been safe.

******* move by the government yes, but still... He knew he had a target on his back and he didn't take actions to protect himself.

I don't know what let them shut down the entire network though.

I'll be the first to agree that some of the charges against him are complete **** though. Although, welcome to the U.S. Our law system is designed to bust you for a minor crime and charge you for 'insert X number' of crimes that you didn't even do.

Example. You have pot in your car? Possession of a controlled substance. Transport of a controlled substance. Possession with the intent to sell. Transport of a controlled substance across state lines.

I'm willing to bet that their are a number of other things you could get charged with for having pot in your car too.

Anyway, if you lost legitimate files from MU's closure, this might intrest you.

In most reports following the MegaUpload shutdown, the site is exclusively portrayed as a piracy haven.

However, hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of people used the site to share research data, work documents, personal video collections.

As of today, these people are still unsure whether they will ever get their personal belongings back.

In a response, Pirate Parties worldwide have started to make a list of all the people affected by the raids, and they are planning to file an official complaint against the US authorities.

“The widespread damage caused by the sudden closure of Megaupload is unjustified and completely disproportionate to the aim intended,” they announce.

For this reason Pirates of Catalonia, in collaboration with Pirate Parties International and other Pirate Parties, have begun investigating these potential breaches of law and will facilitate submission of complaints against the US authorities in as many countries as possible, to ensure a positive and just result.”

“This initiative is a starting point for legitimate internet users to help defend themselves from the legal abuses promoted by those wishing to aggressively lock away cultural materials for their own financial gain.”

MegaUpload users who want to join in on the action can do so here.
Pirate Party ftw?

Due to the nature of their group, although a official party, I don't think this will do anything. Unless it gets some a lot of media attention of course.

The Void

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So how come Kim Schmitz, the creator and owner of MegaUpload faces a 50-year imprisonment while Miguel Carano, who has been found guilty of rape and murder, was faced with only 20 years imprisonment? What a pathetic system for punishment.

Spoiler:


Found this pic somewhere and realized how messed up this world is.
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Oryx

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Did you research it? I've seen things like that (not that exact one) circulating lately and I'm hesitant to believe without sources.

First of all, 50 years is the max that person can serve if they get convicted for every single crime they're indicted for. Which is much more than copyright infringement, although that is one of the crimes. The others are racketeering (earning money through organized crime) and money laundering. The copyright infringement crime is a maximum of 5 years.

Second of all, Miguel Carano is a citizen of Spain. He raped and killed a woman in Spain. He was tried in Spain. He was convicted in Spain. His case was not in the least in our legal system, and therefore highly irrelevant.


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Mr. X

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Did you research it? I've seen things like that (not that exact one) circulating lately and I'm hesitant to believe without sources.
If thats @ the MU complaint then yeah, I've did a bit of research into it.

The Pirate Party is a political group that does have representation in a number of foreign governments. Something like this is one of the things that they would do.

Anyway, as for ACTA,the EU has signed it.
http://www.mofa.go.jp/policy/economy/i_property/acta1201.html

Oryx

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If thats @ the MU complaint then yeah, I've did a bit of research into it.

The Pirate Party is a political group that does have representation in a number of foreign governments. Something like this is one of the things that they would do.

Anyway, as for ACTA,the EU has signed it.
http://www.mofa.go.jp/policy/economy/i_property/acta1201.html
Nah, it was directed towards the image. Sorry for the confusion :)


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Mr. X

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You think taking down that one site will kill torrenting?

No. It won't. While it IS the #2 torrent site (According to TorrentFreak's top 10 list) , all it is is a meta-search site. It just a search engine for torrents. All it does is redirect a person to a site that has the searched for torrent. Killing it won't do anything except scare the smaller torrent sites or torrent search engines. Might cause a couple of them to shutdown, but small torrent sites popup at random and vanish at random too.

Edit - 999 posts. Great number.

Mr. X

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It's hard to say which group pirates the most.

As for why, some beleive in try before you buy, or for movies, watch before you buy, or for music, listen to before you buy. Also, they might not have a good job to afford that stuff. (But really? Why don't they instead spend the time they play pirated games or watch pirated anime/tvshows/movies to instead find a better job, or get the requirements for a better job?)

And lastly, it depends on how much the person really wants the item. If it's a item that they really want, then they would buy a physical, or at least legal, copy of that item.

Nihilego

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Merged the ACTA thread into this one just now. So yeah, since SOPA is dying down now, go ahead and use this to discuss ACTA as well.
s͎̭̚ ̪ͭͩy͔͚̰̻̗̩̺ͣ́ͨ̌͡ ̩̳̙̖̖̺͡m̷̱̘͎̝̘̣͒͌͒̚ ͇͖̔̐̔b̝̪͚̞̦ͬ ̢͔̱̟̞̝͙̮͌̅̈̓̿̿i͐̈̃͊ͯ̎҉̟̠͓ ͕̥̣̪̠̃͑͞ỏ̵͕̠̱̬̬̞͛̋ ̨͈̻̱̟̱͓̪n͒̒͂͊̀ ̻̰̰̜̅̃͒̂͞tͭ̍̈́ ͙͇̘͕͍̜̖ͫ̌̊̿ͫ̂̀:̵̾͒̔͂ ̟͉̜̽͒͌͜p͎͇͎̦̺̙͒͆͋́ͅ ̨̠̠̘͚͖̺ͫ͛̎̉a̲͍̫͖͗̄ ͓͖͍̯̤̼͙̿̆̂̂̄r̬̟̮͖̥̼̆̓͑̃̾ͬ̉͟ͅ ̬̼̗͊͛a̛̯̮ ̮̬͍̙̮̤́ͪŝ͊ͬ̒̎̃ ̧̝̮͎͙͆̓ì͈̹̻̱̾͝ ̘͉͕̭̊ͤ̉̓tͩͯ̉̐ͨͬ̚͏̻̺̖̮ ̞̘͂̋̋ͯ͑ͦ͗e̞͔̎̇ͫ͊͗

Oryx

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(But really? Why don't they instead spend the time they play pirated games or watch pirated anime/tvshows/movies to instead find a better job, or get the requirements for a better job?)
Spoken like someone who has never had to deal with trying to find a job in the recession.

But Cali, pirating is a very, very difficult area to study. How many pirates do you really think would tell a researcher they're a pirate, even if the researcher insists that they won't be reported to the police? How do you properly spread a survey like that around to get a representative sampling, considering that people use many different sites to pirate? And then the people that do answer still won't want to look 'bad', so they'll just give you the 'right' answers and not the ones that are honestly theirs.


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Mercurybro

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I wonder how many people would actually buy the files (music, video, etc) if they weren't able to download them pirated for free over the internet? My guess is, not more than 50%...

Mr. X

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Spoken like someone who has never had to deal with trying to find a job in the recession.
Don't want this to go off topic, but I'm going to respond to that. There is truth in what I said about getting the qualifications for a job and/or a better job.

http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2011-12-05/business/ct-biz-1205-skills-gap-20111205_1_job-openings-skills-gap-career-advisory-board

While the recession is the bigger problem, the lack of skilled workers just makes it worse.

Oryx

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Don't want this to go off topic, but I'm going to respond to that. There is truth in what I said about getting the qualifications for a job and/or a better job.

http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2011-12-05/business/ct-biz-1205-skills-gap-20111205_1_job-openings-skills-gap-career-advisory-board

While the recession is the bigger problem, the lack of skilled workers just makes it worse.
Your implication that if you don't have a job you can't have any free time at any point ever is fallacious. I have a job and go to school full time, as does my sister, as does my mother (whose job is also full-time). We still have at least a few hours of free time every day and to imply that people who don't have jobs should never have any free time or ever relax is completely spoken from the viewpoint of someone who hasn't been affected seriously by the recession.

The point of whether or not they should be pirating is a valid question though. Those people are the type of person that wouldn't be buying it anyway because they don't have the money, which has a good and bad side for companies. The good side is that they're not losing any potential profit because the person wasn't going to buy it anyway. The bad side is that that person isn't really a potential customer due to having no money, and won't pay for what they pirated like other people do at times.


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donavannj

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Don't want this to go off topic, but I'm going to respond to that. There is truth in what I said about getting the qualifications for a job and/or a better job.

http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2011-12-05/business/ct-biz-1205-skills-gap-20111205_1_job-openings-skills-gap-career-advisory-board

While the recession is the bigger problem, the lack of skilled workers just makes it worse.
What makes it worse is not the lack of skilled workers, it's the lack of willingness of companies to take on the risk of an untrained worker and train them in. A lot of those open jobs happen to be in fields you can't exactly go to school for unless you're already inside the industry because the courses are expensive for an unemployed individual and are not eligible for any sort of financial aid.

Piracy by those that wouldn't buy anyway could be positive in that it could give the series some more exposure to those who know the person who did said pirating and they might sing its praises if they liked it and people who know that person might actually go out and buy it themselves. Without piracy, they may not have even heard of that series and never gone out and bought a copy.
whoops

The Void

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Hmmm... it seems that if ACTA is passed, then PC would be totally obliterated and some of the admins here could be arrested. You see, ACTA comes from Japan, which we all know is where Pokemon originated from. US is involved as well. This means that if the bill is passed, Nintendo and Pokemon from both US and Japan can easily sue huge fanmade Pokemon sites and what is one of the biggest sites of all...? PokeCommunity, that's right. And what else? My alma mater, Bulbapedia. :(
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Mr. X

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No.

As of now, the entire site falls under 'fair use' protections.

Also, we don't host pirated content. So, no reason for them to target us.

Scare tactics much? Then again, both sides are running them into the ground. Frankly, the scare tactics on both sides have gotten to the point that I don't care what happens, I just want all the stuff to finish up real quick like.

Netto Azure

Kiel

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Lots of people already use services like this. iTunes for example on MP3's, effectively revived the Music Industry. People would prefer the cheap, legal alternative if it was given to them.

I seriously would love to not have to edit info just to have the right artist name or song/movie info rather than waste time having to edit details. :/

As for PC being under fair use protections. Have you visited the ROM hacking section lately? I seriously doubt we have the finances to argue in court for the difference between ROM Hacking and actually providing the Base ROM's from which the games are based off.

Mr. X

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I said as of now. As in, right now under the current laws. Not any laws that may be passed in the future.

All we have is a section were rom hackers can post patches for their creations. Under current laws, this is allowed as we do not provide the base roms for them.
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It's hard to say which group pirates the most.
I suppose it is.
As for why, some beleive in try before you buy, or for movies, watch before you buy, or for music, listen to before you buy.
Acceptable, in my opinion.
Also, they might not have a good job to afford that stuff.
Which means that they would not have bought it anyway, which means that no money was lost or gained. Depending on the way you look at it, not even potential money was lost, because they would not have bought it in the first place.
(But really? Why don't they instead spend the time they play pirated games or watch pirated anime/tvshows/movies to instead find a better job, or get the requirements for a better job?)
Well, I agree. But this is where it gets far more complex. More complex than you might think.


But Cali, pirating is a very, very difficult area to study. How many pirates do you really think would tell a researcher they're a pirate, even if the researcher insists that they won't be reported to the police?

I believe the one who did the research wouldn't want to get involved in a sentence.
Besides, unless you have very specific conditions, personal information should be irrelevant.
How do you properly spread a survey like that around to get a representative sampling, considering that people use many different sites to pirate?
How are the means to acquire the content relevant? I also believe that most would be using the most popular ones, so it shouldn't matter. Also, many sites share the same functionality, and the only difference is the name, design, and perhaps another few functions.
And then the people that do answer still won't want to look 'bad', so they'll just give you the 'right' answers and not the ones that are honestly theirs.
I believe if someone is willing to admit he or she is pirating, he or she won't have problems admitting more.

Netto Azure

Kiel

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I said as of now. As in, right now under the current laws. Not any laws that may be passed in the future.

All we have is a section were rom hackers can post patches for their creations. Under current laws, this is allowed as we do not provide the base roms for them.
Under current laws. Which we are trying to keep as is (in the status quo.) Hence the protest against these proposed bills.

Anyways, I agree with the rest of your previous statement, so it's all good.

Oryx

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I believe the one who did the research wouldn't want to get involved in a sentence.
Besides, unless you have very specific conditions, personal information should be irrelevant.
Not sure what you're getting at here. If you're looking for why pirates pirate things, you have to separate the people that don't pirate from the people that do pirate, which is highly relevant. The reason I mentioned that the researcher would insist they're just a researcher (the only irrelevant personal information there) is because otherwise the pirates may think the person is just looking for a confession of pirating to slap them with fines and arrests and court dates.

How are the means to acquire the content relevant? I also believe that most would be using the most popular ones, so it shouldn't matter. Also, many sites share the same functionality, and the only difference is the name, design, and perhaps another few functions.
Not acquiring the content, but acquiring the survey results. If you only put that survey on a website that gets most of its traffic from the US, you're not representing the worldwide population properly, and vice versa on other places. If you're talking to people who are already arrested for pirating, then you're only talking to the people who were dumb enough to get caught, or the mass pirates that attract so much attention because they pirate all the time, which definitely underrepresents the average pirate in a survey. Think of this from the side of the person actually studying it.

I believe if someone is willing to admit he or she is pirating, he or she won't have problems admitting more.
You're quite optimistic. Even people that aren't breaking the law lie. Besides, if you want to know how many people pirate just because they want the free stuff, how do you know that those people just aren't replying to the survey at all because they know that their pirating makes the rest of the pirates (the ones that pirate and then buy things, the ones that only pirate what they already own, etc) look bad? How do you control for that?

Criminology is difficult.


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Mr. X

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I found the article that I was talking about earlier in this thread. Well, I think it was this thread. But either way, it was a lot of pages ago that I mentioned it.

It is said that those who don’t study history are doomed to repeat it. In the case of the copyright industry, they have learned that they can get new monopoly benefits and rent-seeker’s benefits every time there is a new technology, if they just complain loudly enough to the legislators.

The past 100 years have seen a vast array of technical advances in broadcasting, multiplication and transmissions of culture, but equally much misguided legislators who sought to preserve the old at expense of the new, just because the old was complaining. First, let’s take a look at what the copyright industry tried to ban and outlaw, or at least receive taxpayer money in compensation for its existence:

It started around 1905, when the self-playing piano was becoming popular. Sellers of note sheet music proclaimed that this would be the end of artistry if they couldn’t make a living off of middlemen between composers and the public, so they called for a ban on the player piano. A famous letter in 1906 claims that both the gramophone and the self-playing piano will be the end of artistry, and indeed, the end of a vivid, songful humanity.

In the 1920s, as broadcast radio started appearing, another copyright industry was demanding its ban because it cut into profits. Record sales fell from $75 million in 1929 to $5 million four years later — a recession many times greater than the record industry’s current troubles. (Speaking of recession, the drop in profits happened to coincide with the Great Depression.) The copyright industry sued radio stations, and collecting societies started collecting part of the station profits under a blanket “licensing” scheme. Laws were proposed that would immunize the new radio medium from the copyright industry, but they did not pass.

In the 1930s, silent movies were phased out by movies with audio tracks. Every theater had previously employed an orchestra that played music to accompany the silent movies, and now, these were out of a job. It is quite conceivable that this is the single worst technology development for professional performers. Their unions demanded guaranteed jobs for these performers in varying propositions.

In the 1940s, the movie industry complained that the television would be the death of movies, as movie industry profits dropped from $120 million to $31 million in five years. Famous quote: “Why pay to go see a movie when you can see it at home for free?”

In 1972, the copyright industry tried to ban the photocopier. This push was from book publishers and magazine publishers alike. “The day may not be far off when no one need purchase books.”

The 1970s saw the advent of the cassette tape, which is when the copyright industry really went all-out in proclaiming their entitlement. Ads saying “Home taping is killing music!” were everywhere. The band Dead Kennedys famously responded by subtly changing the message in adding “…industry profits”, and “We left this side [of their tape] blank, so you can help.”

The 1970s also saw another significant shift, where DJs and loudspeakers started taking the place of live dance music. Unions and the copyright industry went ballistic over this, and suggested a “disco fee” that would be charged at locations playing disco (recorded) music, to be collected by private organizations under governmental mandate and redistributed to live bands. This produces hearty laughter today, but that laughter stops sharp with the realization that the disco fee was actually introduced, and still exists.

The 1980s is a special chapter with the advent of video cassette recorders. The copyright industry’s famous quote when testifying before the US Congress – where the film lobby’s highest representative said that “The VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone” — is the stuff of legend today. Still, it bears reminding that the Sony vs so-called Betamax case went all the way to the Supreme Court, and that the VCR was as near as could be from being killed by the copyright industry: The Betamax team won the case by 5-4 in votes.

Also in the late 1980s, we saw the complete flop of the Digital Audio Tape (DAT). A lot of this can be ascribed to the fact that the copyright industry had been allowed to put its politics into the design: the cassette, although technically superior to the analog Compact Cassette, was so deliberately unusable for copying music that people rejected it flat outright. This is an example of a technology that the copyright industry succeeded in killing, even though I doubt it was intentional: they just got their wishes as to how it should work to not disrupt the status quo.

In 1994, Fraunhofer Institute published a prototype implementation of its digital coding technique that would revolutionize digital audio. It allowed CD-quality audio to take one-tenth of the disk space, which was very valuable in this time, when a typical hard drive would be just a couple of gigabytes. Technically known as MPEG-1 Audio Layer III, it was quickly shortened to “MP3” in everyday speak. The copyright industry screamed again, calling it a technology that only can be used for criminal activity. The first successful MP3 player, the Diamond Rio, saw the light in 1998. It had 32 megabytes of memory. Despite good sales, the copyright industry sued its maker, Diamond Multimedia, into oblivion: while the lawsuit was struck down, the company did not recover from the burden of defending. The monopoly middlemen tried aggressively to have MP3 players banned.

The century ended with the copyright middlemen pushing through a new law in the United States called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which would have killed the Internet and social media by introducing intermediary liability — essentially killing social technologies in their cradle. Only with much effort did the technology industry manage to stave off disaster by introducing so-called “safe harbors” that immunizes the technical companies from liability on the condition that they throw the end-users to the wolves on request. The internet and social media survived the copyright industry’s onslaught by a very narrow escape that still left it significantly harmed and slowed.

Right after the turn of the century, the use of Digital Video Recorders was called “stealing” as it allowed for skipping of commercials (as if nobody did that before).

In 2003, the copyright industry tried to have its say in the design of HDTV with a so-called “broadcast flag” that would make it illegal to manufacture devices that could copy movies so flagged. In the USA, the FCC miraculously granted this request, but was struck down in bolts of lightning by courts who said they had way overstepped their mandate.

What we have here is a century of deceit, and a century revealing the internal culture inherent in the copyright industry. Every time something new appears, the copyright industry has learned to cry like a little baby that needs more food, and succeeds practically every time to get legislators to channel taxpayer money their way or restrict competing industries. And every time the copyright industry succeeds in doing so, this behavior is further reinforced.

It is far past due that the copyright industry is stripped of its nobility benefits, every part of its governmental weekly allowance, and gets kicked out of its comfy chair to get a damn job and learn to compete on a free and honest market.