But then we get into the whole “copying is not theft” territory. You can agree with it or not, but it does have merit.

If you steal my CC# and then purchase $10k worth of crap, then that $10k comes out of my pocket and I will be expected to pay it or contest it. When you download my song or movie what do I lose?

Potentially, I lost the retail value of that item – I lost a sale. But that implies that you would buy that item if it was not available for download. Which is a problematic assumption. What if a 14 year old download an album because parents wouldn’t buy him the CD. Does it count as a lost sale?

Time and time again people release statistics which claim that record sales are not really directly affected by download rate.

But you are right – currently, sharing without authorization from copyright holder is considered infringement and is illegal under current law. So yeah, when we share, we break the law. And here is the problem:

If there is a law that just about everyone, young and old breaks daily without remorse or fear of ever being caught, and without clear damage being done to anyone, is that law really just, and necessary? Perhaps it needs to be re-evaluated.

Again, despite the fact that just about every movie is available via bit torrent before the release date, the movie studios are still making millions at the box office. Same goes for games and music – all these industries are doing great despite widespread “piracy”.

I’m not saying that “piracy” is good, glamorous or that it achieves something. Nope – it’s pretty much selfish, and inconsiderate. I believe that if you really enjoyed something you downloaded you should probably go and pay for it to support the creators.

But I hate when people paint this into this nefarious crime talking about theft, piracy, robbery and etc. It’s a minor, insignificant crime – probably at the same level as j-walking.

I guess my beef is with those who say “we’re just copying a bunch of 1s and 0s and the original is left intact”, combined with an inability for a thief to call themselves a thief.

You do have a partial point with a CC#, but in essence, you will only give out a CC# or a root password if you think you are going to gain from it. It’s the same with movies. A movie is made to make money (at least, the movies people steal are), and they give out the movie in return for gain. The basic process is the same thing: here is something of mine, give me something of yours. If you’re not holding up your end of the deal, then you should at least admit it and not pretend like you’re striking a blow for the common good by entertaining yourself. I’m not saying stop doing it, I’m saying stop fooling yourself :) (generic ‘you’, by the way).

I thoroughly agree that they won’t stop filesharing, and that I think a more-accessible medium will find more purchasers, but the lack of that doesn’t make nicking stuff a somehow worthy task as some would have us believe.

I guess I just like calling a spade a spade.

Actually, I don’t really think that all information should be free. The need for privacy is another thing that I believe is a core component of human psyche.

The difference between your credit card number and a movie is that you only want to give that number to few people. It is meant to be private, and handled in certain way (eg. encrypted, stored in a secure database, etc). The expectation to keep this soft of information private is a reasonable one, and we do have cryptographic tools that make it possible. For example, I can expect that the SSL encryption used to protect my CC# when I shop at Amazon is good enough to protect me from some random guy stealing it by snooping my packets.

Now, of course if I send my CC# over the internet in plain text, or if the company I do business with accidentally leaks it out on the internet – I have no illusions about stopping it. It’s out there, and there is no way of controlling it. It will be shared. But as long as correct security protocols are followed, this should not happen.

A movie on the other hand meant to be widely circulated. You put it on TV, you sell DVD’s, you sell it via iTunes. You want everyone to have it but at the same time you want to protect people from exchanging. This clearly doesn’t work, and we do not have technology to prevent this. DRM is a joke – as evidenced by Bioshock, which despite having the most annoying, anti-costumer DRM on the market was still cracked in 11 days.

When you try to protect CC# the attacker is the 3rd person snooping in on the transaction between you and the recipient. With DRM, the recipient is the attacker which makes all the strong cryptography really useless.

Furthermore, leaking out information meant to be kept private is much more damaging than sharing information that was meant to be public. If I want to keep my CC# number private, I can only give it out to the vendors I trust. When you are selling movie or a record, you actually want to sell them to everyone – including the people who buy it just to rip it, and share it somewhere.

That said, I do buy movies and games. I have no problem paying for them – sometimes it’s just nice to bring home the nice CD and the box. All I’m saying is that preventing file sharing is futile. It will always be around. But I believe that if you make it easy and convenient, people will be will still be willing to pay for good quality product. I mean look at iTunes – they actually make good business selling digital songs, even though their DRM has been broken many, many times, and all the songs they sell circulate on P2P networks in every imaginable bitrate, and format.

If you make a good product that is worth buying people will choose it over the low quality rip from a p2p network most of the time.

I don’t think that “information needs to be free”. It doesn’t. Some information should be kept contained. The problem is that it is very difficult to do. Once released to the public, the information just spreads. You can keep it contained if you keep it a secret and only share it with those who you trust. But you can’t really expect to distribute information to anyone who asks for it, and expect to keep it contained it at the same time. It just doesn’t work like that.

ah, balls. If you’re going to nick people’s work without paying them the money they’re asking for it, then at least grow a pair and call it what it is. It is piracy, not this whiffle of ‘information wants to be free’ nonsense that comes from the same slashdot fanbois who cry treason when personal information is lost to inadequate privacy measures. Sharing information may be a social instinct, but so is keeping information to oneself. You just need to look at different people.

I have no problems with a mixed pirate who pirates some, pays for some. For me, I pirate games. The games industry had it’s chance to prove that prices come down when technology outpaces piracy, and it failed dramatically (back when everyone had CD-ROMs but CD-Burners were very expensive). To wit, it lied. Games are all about charging what the punters will pay, and piracy control is about increasing the dollar margins. Given also the recent fiasco with Bioshock, I rate it even worse. I’m about 66/33 pirate/paid with games these days, planning to up that ratio since Bioshock did a nasty job on me. There’s something nice about taking home a printed CD, but there’s something even nicer about installing a game that will work without headaches and actually getting to play it.

I do have a problem with someone who never ever pays for a game when they have the means to do so. That’s just being a cheap bastard. If you’re a student with no money, sure, but if you’re a professional, pony up some dough occasionally.

And the GNU people go to the opposite extreme by calling it ‘sharing information’. It is what it is – you’re taking something that isn’t yours to begin with and not returning any token of value requested. It’s theft. Admit it, and keep on doing it if you want to. It’s not a holy crusade that just so happens to sate your desire for entertainment. If they truly believe that information should be free, ask them to divulge their root passwords/credit card numbers/dating site credentials and see how far you get.

/rant off

I actually believe the term “Pirate” is derogatory and spiteful. I believe that sharing information is natural social instinct of the human animal. It is as natural to us as breathing and what are digital copies of movies, songs and games if not information?

It’s not piracy – it’s information exchange. The only way to stop it is to stop free flow of information.

Also, see what GNU thinks about this word.

The main problem with them calling illegal copying piracy, is that pirates are so darn cool – the only way it could be less of a disincentive is if they decided to call it “media ninja-ing” :wink:

hehe, reminds me of something I heard about, apparently one strategy being used by some UK anti-piracy group is to try and make the image of the heinous pirates basically into cheapskate social rejects, I have since seen 1 advert featuring “knock-off Nigel” who’s some loser who buys bootleg DVDs.

All this amused me on so many levels – casting the pirate as a social reject a. won’t work when the illegality is so widespread (everyone and their mate knows where to find free music and films) and b. won’t work against the hardcore hacker types who are downloading terabytes of stuff because they’re already social rejects and are proud of it. Second, the bootleg DVD market is being destroyed by Bittorrent/Limewire/eMule, so they’re not even up to date, and third, the fact that only 1 advert ever appeared suggests that it was all an epic failure :D

Even my spamword for this is “fail”

Piracy? I thought you need a ship, open sea, wooden peg, and eye patch and a parrot to be a pirate. Hmm… Maybe I’m mistaken. ;)

I shouldn’t have said “aggregator,” which implies some automated feed reader or indexer. Newtorrents is entirely human moderated. It’s only an aggregator in the sense that it’s listing torrents tracked elsewhere; they don’t host trackers themselves.

In other words, if a release is not an official scene release found on databases like Dupecheck Project or this scene release meta search engine, it’s probably not allowed on Newtorrents.

By the way, you can get an overview of this so-called “scene” on this site called AboutTheScene.

P.S. I do not condone piracy. I do not pirate. I have nothing to do with any of these matters I am describing. Just let me watch my precious fansubbed anime! ^_^

Interesting. I usually stayed clear from torrent aggregators choosing going directly to the sources. I figured that most of these places were essentially ad farms tying to catch revenue by indexing other people’s torrents.

Newtorrents looks cool – especially if they do have a good quality control. One thing I hate are floods of fakes or crappy releases that waste your time and bandwidth. I will check it out.

I kinda like Bittorrent Monster (btmon.com), it indexes/searches torrents from a bunch of places, including most of the places I look for torrents (Isohunt, TPB, Mininova, Demonoid etc).

Only thing is that the search isn’t all that awesome. Most of the time it’s fine but when you’re looking for something a little weird it can be easier to go back to the individual sites.