Despite Six Strikes, US ISPs Disconnecting Repeat Offenders

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So who is protecting me, the consumer, against the same ISPs from stealing my personal information and selling it without my consent? This is the essence of hypocritical.
 
Yeah, that quoting thing didn't work out quite so well, and apparently I can't edit my post.
Its good to see that you gave yourself a username that fits you well...clueless. You have no idea about economics or how the real world works. For example, have you even thought about the $50k-ish income making programmers and artists who develop games for EA etc? Thier livelyhoods depend on the income from those games. If they make a good game and it is pirated to all hell, their development studio closes. And dont feed us the line of BS of "if its a good game i will buy it". We both know that you would come up with some excuse not to. Being against corrupt executives i can understand, but being anti capitalism i cant. Look at the countries that have communism in them and tell me with a straight face that you think life there is better than it is here.
 
loved living in Guatemala. Download police?? haha.... as soon as the country started enforcing the homicide laws, I might have worried about it (although there are probably a lot of crimes between homicide and illegal downloads for them to enforce first). All these rules apply to the USA only. America = corporate police state.

Guatamala, what a wonder place to live. Your people are fleeing by the tens of thousands everyday to come to america...yeah, it is sooo terrible here.
 
I used to pirate video games, until STEAM rolled around. excellent games at cheap prices, they sell in volume, we ALL win.

if movies and music were proportionally cheaper, i would buy those too. i would want nothing more than the purest quality of music/movies without the worry of a poor rip. but they don't want to sell in volume because they are still in the 20th century.

and no, i don't buy the "stolen property is stolen" argument. they make plenty of money as it is. im not worried.

So you want things of the highest quality but don't want to pay anything for them. If everyone was like you we would be all living in the stone age still.
 
I bet that if you got a good lawyer they could sue this rightscorp out of existence, since this is simply blackmail and extortion rather than a real settlement. A settlement is used to avoid legal action, blackmail is meant to avoid a non-legal action that is not in a contract.
 
I never understood the logic behind: "its too expensive, so im gonna pirate"

If you cant afford something.. then go without.
or save your allowance until you CAN afford it.
 


if I go without it, im the only loser. If I pirate it, then no one is the loser.
 
This wont solve anything.

People will go get the files hosted in countries that aren't subject to US Copyright law. The gaming industry has done this to themselves by producing lower quality products, valuing profit above quality, and compromising the integrity of honest reviewing online.

For as large an industry as gaming is they sure do exploit the consumer being as unregulated as they are.
 
LOOL $20 per shared file. Considering most of them are .99 cent mp3s, go to hell. Some of the comments I took the liberty to skim....

A) Filesharing is not theft. Theft deprives the rightful owner of property. File sharing does no such thing.

B) Did you seriously just call "pirates" the worst criminals out there? Not rapists? Murderers? Sex offenders? Embezzlers? Not the people who ran Tyco, Adelphia, Enron? Ruined thousands of lives? Not malevolent politicians? Not the private bankers? Not drug cartels? Idiot.
 
keep in mind that most of the top software companies are in business because their products were easy to steal. Microsoft Windows being #1 on that list. If Microsoft Windows had the activation system put in place now, nobody would've picked it. Same can be said for Photoshop, Maya, AutoCAD, etc. All these companies owe Piracy as the cause of being in business. Demand is what generates sales. Market use is what creates demand.
 
So I see a lot of the same tired, stupid, arguments over and over again.
First, theft is the taking of property that doesn't belong to you or that you haven't paid for. Period. You can try to dress it up any which way you want. You take something that isn't yours or hasn't been given to you, it's theft. You can argue about how "noble" it was or whatever, but you're still a thief. You're only deluding yourself if you start trying to bend the definition.

Second, flat penalty models are generally stupid. Tailored penalty models are costly and time consuming. Flat models win out because the people in charge don't feel like going through the hassle of figuring the actual costs for each individual likely to fall under the umbrella. Without a guarantee that they won't later come back to throw you in jail for your pirating, paying this fee without a legal document protecting yourself from criminal liability would be like paying for evidence against yourself. That being said, $20 per file likely sounds like a pittance compared to the financial penalty a court would hand down, not to mention possible jail time on top of it. How much is a year of your life in jail worth to you?

Third, these actions are not meant to wrangle the specific cost dodged by that single pirate. It's about protection of the content. If tomorrow some company said "we're not going to try to stop pirates, or seek to inhibit the activities of pirates" you'd see their quarterly profits fall through the floor. Why? Because no one likes to pay for anything. This idea that pirates are merely trying to balance the scales is hogwash. Even if that were true for some pirates, and I don't doubt some hold that warped thinking, the vast majority of pirates, and people in general, would look at it as an opportunity to score a lot of free stuff. If these companies don't protect their content, it's like saying they don't care if people go and get it for free, which says either how little they care about their product, or that they plan on going out of business fairly soon if they keep it up long enough.

You don't like a company, ignore them. That's the best way. You don't buy anything from them, and you tell others don't buy anything from them, and eventually they will naturally disappear as a company. Claims of holding them accountable by piracy is more often than not a simple convenient excuse.
 




Actually, to all you nay-sayers, I've studied quite a bit of political economy (probably more than the all of you combined) and have a quite good understanding of how it functions in the real world apart from its idealizations, e.g. Keynes, Ricardo, Hayek, Marx, Smith, Mises, etc, but all in all I don't accept the fundamental premises of most of political economy other than Marx's critique of it and the critiques and analyses which followed him. Profit itself is theft because the capital required to produce goods or services was A PRIORI created by workers, with workers being the ones who actually create value (necessary value and surplus value) as determined by the amount of socially necessary labor time required to produce a commodity, with the only thing entitling capitalists to both capital and the products thereof as engendered by labor being money and power (in this instance, class) relations enforced through legal institutions. Therefore, capitalists are entirely superfluous to the production and distribution process while disproportionately benefiting from it in contrast to workers or even the piracy communities, and therefore I'm going to steal from corporations and laugh about it. No matter how you want to cut it, we can live without capitalists and corporations but they can't live (as a class) without us.

This is simply the best way that I can frame this without having to go into too much depth about it. So what would be my solution? Abolish the capitalist class or abolish class altogether. Could you not discern how I made a distinction between independently to smaller scale produced goods and services and corporations when it comes to piracy? Profitability is almost never an issue for these corporations in which the upper tiers and shareholders are the ones who are reaping the profits, and wages aren't derived from profit (although profit is often reinvested into new projects and expansion, which isn't necessarily a good thing for either workers or consumers) rather than being a part of the initial investment (necessary value). Piracy is a marginal phenomenon and like others have argued doesn't constitute an actual loss for the company. And instead of this bourgeois notion of trickle down economics and sacrifice on the behalf of the workers or even consumers, maybe upper management should be forced to take reductions in pay? Honestly, a lot of the stuff EA puts out while still selling in the millions is crap to begin with and I'm not obligated to buy crap or even expend the necessary amount of time to pirate it, compensate for an inherently unstable economic system where inflated budgets and the overaccumulation of capital and its tendencies results in people getting laid off with a decline in living standards, or to apologize for hierarchical relations and power structures. One of these days that bubble's gonna POP POP POP, and everything will come tumbling down just as it has many times before.

Oh, and none of those countries were or are actually communist, and I'm not even a Marxist. China, where virtually all commodities are produced these days so corporations can circumvent labor regulations and laws that were implemented because of the threat of class struggle (influenced by revolutionary ideas) in the Western world, being thoroughly capitalist but under an authoritarian regime of a Communist Party, actually have some pretty bad work conditions and wages to deal with. You shouldn't conceive of a company as a whole rather than in parts, and then decide who it is that you become partial to, all notions of *just corruption* aside. And personally, I agree with Shark. Fu** your business and fu** a capitalist. I'll buy something from a co-operative, if out of principle more than it being an actual form of resistance or potential alternative to capitalism, but then again most companies aren't co-operatives. You want to spearhead something? Make sure UK Crytek workers get paid and soon or stfu and not apologize for Crytek as a company or market dynamics, because you can't blame piracy on that one.
 
Join a private tracker and pay $10 a month for a VPN or seedbox and you won't have to give a dime to the greedy and corrupt RIAA and MPAA.
 
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