Whether piracy is to be defined as theft or not is not up to us to decide I think, but there's one thing I'd like to ask the community: Is piracy morally wrong or not? Are people like for instance the founders or Pirate Bay the good guys and the people who wants to stop them the bad guys? I'd like to know because if you guys think it's ok then there's some PMDG stuff I would like to "acquire".

Wouldn't it be nice if it was that easy? Black and white, good and bad, right or wrong. Who would answer that piracy is a good thing? Nobody. When asked anonymously. Some. But I doubt that the majority of people says that it's ok to get something for free while other people had to invest time and money to create it and placed it in a shop at a reasonable price.

 

So where's the catch? Well, first of all. Lets forget about the black and white schemes. They are wrong on every political topic I know, wrong on every war, on every event where you were told that there is a clear good and a clear bad side. Rhetorical exercises and reality often enough only share a bunch of letters.

 

I think the thread shows where the criticism on 'anti-piracy' comes up. If this 'anti' means that all people are controlled and marked as potential abusers, with industry lead committees just waiting to catch one and, in the meantime, making use of all the data collected, we could call that wrong. In legal terms, at least 'out of scale'. And it isn't even controlled by the government in our case (thread topic).

 

It also doesn't look at the causes but only at the symptoms and I sometimes start to wonder what they would do if there was no generic evil, no piracy. Who could you blame for a bad product, bad sales? You can't measure the actual piracy impact, you can't even tell if the illegal downloads all lead to people using your stuff, which of those later bought it and which guy never touched it, but just collected. Saying that there is an impact is true, measuring it is.. well, difficult.

 

And you see this lack of numbers being a problem in lawsuits. While 'the losses' and their numbers get repeated as much as that 'piracy is theft' (wrong) message, you can't convince a judge to believe in a right for sales. If the car dealer sells less cars than expected, he can't sue the public or control them for getting their cars somewhere else or just not buying any at all. An expected amount of sales is a planning value, no legal binding one.

 

Of course, media often leaves out a vital word. 'Expected' losses because of 'expected' sales. If you expect your nice plane for FSX to get sold some 2000 times and only receive 800, you can't, in no system on this planet, sue anyone for 1200 'lost' and you also don't own a right to now control whole countries and their Internet usage. You can assume that the availability of a free pirated copy of your plane lead to a lower number in sales. But how big was the impact? Dramatically of course! Well, can you prove that or are you just assuming the impact of an.. assumption. :mellow:

 

So is piracy legal now? No. Why would anyone think that? Is it theft? No, no law defines it as such. So there are no losses due to piracy? Who says that? :huh: But what is the solution to piracy? I don't know. But I do know that the industry loves the symptoms since decades and doesn't leave out a chance to develop rather desperate and out of scale countermeasures. Closing down a single website or file hoster? Come on! Developing intrusive copy protections which only cause activation problems or worse? Observing the whole Net because some of the valued customers could go wrong? :wacko:

 

It's not that good ideas or creative approaches on the case are absent. There are devs focusing on getting more customers instead of less pirates. There even are devs which encourage the users of illegal copies to really try the product and then think about supporting it. And there are devs not relying on fancy 'unbreakable' protections but some basic stuff, good prices and a very good service.

 

When buying games not being within the flight sim spectrum, I sometimes felt like a guy being tolerated but not welcome. Starting a single player game and the background soft then connects to a server and delivers all kind of stuff to 'allow' me, the guy who's paid 60 bucks and is planned to go for another 60 on dreaded DLCs, to finally play his game. Thanks! Not! :lol:

Allthough capitalism is the one single factor that has bettered the most amount of peoples living standard, health and life expectancy by far in the history of the world. Far more successful than even penicillin

 

Actually, free market capitalism and copyrights are diametrically opposed concepts.

 

A copyright (or a patent) is a state created monopoly over the creation, sale and distribution of certain items.

 

Free markets abhor state created monopolies. State created monopolies are antithetical to free markets.

 

So you either support copyright claims, or you support free markets. But not both.

 

Whether piracy is to be defined as theft or not is not up to us to decide...

 

Actuallly, it is a legal question. When we talk about things like theft and property, we are bandying about legal terminology.

 

Copyright infringement is not theft because copyrighted material is not property. At least it is not property in any normal definition of the term. For those of us in the British commonwealth, the U.S. or other common law jurisdiction, copyrighted material is not "property" under the common law. To the extent it is property, it is only so by virtue of legistlative fiat. That is, the legislature has created a monopoly and seeks to enforce that monopoly through the use of either the criminal or civil justice systems.

 

If copyrighted material is not property, the infringement of any such state monopoly is not theft. Theft, by definition, is the taking of property. No property, no theft.

 

Originally, copyrights were quite limited both in scope and duration. For example, while a written piece of sheet music could be copyrighted, the performance or recording of that piece of music could not be copyrighted. What happened was the legislature rewrote the copyright laws to include recorded music. (This becomes easy to understand once one realizes that the recording of performances is a relatively modern development, whereas copyright dates back to the 18th century.) Usually, these legislative changes are done at the behest of very powerful and well monied special interests.

 

If you don't like the rules, you change them.

 

It coult be argued that current copyright law in the United States is unconstitutional. The power to grant copyrights is one of Congress' enumerated powers under Article I of the United States constitution. However, such copyrtghts are to be limited in both duration and scope. They are not to exist in perpetuity and they are only supposed to be used to encourage literary and scientific progress. However, this argument has yet to be considered by the appellate courts. Given the current composition of the United States Supreme Court, it is also likely that these limitations will be ignored.

 

One should also be aware that these copyright laws serve to increase wealth inequality and social stratification. Given that wealth inequality in the United States is currently greater than that of Argentina in the 1940s, any policy which serves to increase that inequality is, to be charitable, insane.

Megaupload back on the cloud scene ..

Will be available this Saturday 19 January 06H50 PM (CET)

http://mega.co.nz

Clock

http://mega.co.nz/press

Kim Dot Com

http://kim.com

It's my understanding that various UK ISPs have been sending out written warnings to customers who are heavy users of P2P networks. I've heard my own ISP - Virgin Media - does this.

 

I find it quite interesting that the assumption is that *all* torrent traffic is illegal. Head over to the DCS website and you'll see that they offer their products for download via torrent - which for people with higher speed connections can provide a faster download than the likes of HTTP or FTP. I'm also a big fan of Creative Assembly's Total War series of strategy games. This series has a very active and vibrant modding community with many community created mods available which weigh in at several GB - often too big for the "free" file hosting services. The only way these free, community created mods can be speedily and reliably distributed is via P2P networks.

 

I believe it wasn't too long ago that the UK High Court ordered several of the big UK ISPs to block access to TPB. This is of course an absolute waste of time as any remotely savvy internet user will know that all they have to do is make use of the plethora of free anonymous proxy websites (or a VPN) which will allow them to circumvent their ISP's block. Likewise the attempt to monitor a customer's usage and look for torrent traffic is again a bit pointless as most torrent clients can be configured to use the port normally reserved for HTTPS connections and encrypt the data packets. Then of course there are the various mirror sites for TPB which can be created faster than ISPs can block them.

 

The only way to stamp out piracy on the Internet is to create a North Korean style system where only certain "approved" websites and services are available. Reactionary measures to try and plug holes and fix the leaks aren't going to work because the holes and leaks will appear just as fast as you can plug them.

 

I do find it quite worrying that commercial interests are slowly encroaching on the freedom of the Internet.

 

Perhaps more interesting is what the guy behind Steam has to say about piracy - "Try to offer a service better than the pirates." It apparently works pretty well for Steam which as become a massive success with something like 20 million active users and increasing sales year on year - despite the fact that pretty much every PC game release is available for download illegally.

This is the kind of allowed legislation that I hate. It is just one more step to a government approved Internet. They go hand in hand, monitoring and just watching is a super super fine line, and unfortunately, the American government is not good at walking that line. Usually it is always to one side or the other.

 

Of course this is not government, at least not government in a traiditonal sense. This is corporate America defending the interests of the wealthy. It is only government if you believe that the real government is giant corporations.

 

Unlike the real government, there is no due process. You don't get a hearing or a trial before they punish you. The corporation is judge jury and executioner.

 

Plus, the corporation determines what is protected and what is not. It may only be based on a claim that something is protected.

 

For example. if you download X-Plane, a legitimate copy, you may be vioating this policy, because X-Plane allegedly infringes on someone else's intellectual property.

 

Perhaps its time to recognize that intellectual property law has gone to far. The whole notion of copyrights and patents is anti-market. It has gone far beyond the original goal of encouraging literary and scientific progress, and has metastacised into siome sort of weird property right.

I remember trading 5.5"Floppy's around the school yard when I was 13 years old (back around 1985). This was piracy before the internet, but when we were 13 we didn't realize that as we were just trading copies of things like Montezuma's Revenge or Lode Runner, etc. Hard to stop it then, even harder to stop it now.

 

I actually don't pirate anymore so not worried about these new rules.

 

That how I got into Flight Sim and Test Drive traded Dooom and motorcycle race game was small floppy before the internet era. We grew up traded games you beat for games have not played yet, or could not buy at the time.

If I read where the internet providers penalize even one punk who stole something that the rest of us had to work to pay for, it will make my week. There is nothing worse than a thief who steals from someone their life, money, natural rights, etc.

If I read where the internet providers penalize even one punk who stole something that the rest of us had to work to pay for, it will make my week.

 

What about people who use P2P torrenting for legitimate purposes? What if my neighbour hacks my wireless network and uses it without my knowledge or permission? What if my niece or nephew come to stay and I let them use my internet connection and they are downloading stuff illegally without my knowledge?

My issue is that the ISP's are cow towing to the MPAA and RIAA. What the hell do the ISP's care what customers do with data. They are in business of selling data, not policing the internet. Besides AT$T is is setting a horrible precident of charging for data overages. Its almost in there best interest to have torrent, Megaupload, mp3 et etc downloading.

 

I just don't get it, unless these ISP's have been paid off or something.

Some explanations of the internet laws .. by Kim Dot Com himself !!

He can't be wrong :lol:

I would like to bring up an old post on the internet, which was originally designed by and for the military to SHARE, send/receive information and programs and intelligence to what it has become now. But here is the old article: http://articles.lati...fi-micropiracy9

 

 

oh wait, .... WHO here used their Win 7 Windows Upgrade feature to download the free copy of Windows 8 (presumably as a beta), but instead was a full working copy? Guess what, YOU ARE NOW A PIRATE!! **BUT**, by Bill Gates own words: "Although about 3 million computers get sold every year in China, people don't pay for the software. Someday they will, though," Gates told an audience at the University of Washington. "And as long as they're going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade."

 

Meaning::

"The first dose is free," said Hal Varian, a professor of information management at UC Berkeley, facetiously comparing Microsoft's anti-piracy policy to street-corner marketing of illicit drugs. "Once you start using a product, you keep using it."

Even as the Internet makes global piracy easier than ever, Microsoft's revenue and profit have risen steadily. It earned $12 billion on $41.4 billion in revenue in calendar '05.

 

 

so yeah..... all of these Internet providers are going to start blocking certain websites, and falsely accusing its customers who share their vacation photos over email, or FTP because the file is over 25mb in size.... when in fact, PIRACY HELPS CERTAIN COMPANIES MAKE MORE MONEY!!!!!!!!

 

Example: Pirate download Photoshop 8. you start playing with it, you like it, you make a bunch of repaints using said program, then you can now go sell your FSX Nemeth Design MD500 Repaints for $2.50 each. Well, to keep up with the times, you take your several hundred dollars from your sells and go PURCHASE Photoshop 9. ADOBE JUST MADE MONEY SO QUIT GRIPING ABOUT IT!!!

 

 

 

 

I would also like to enclose the following link: http://www.it.ojp.gov/default.aspx?area=privacy&page=1284#contentTop

 

in specific, the following quote from said link:

Title III of the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968, (Pub. L. 90-351; 6/19/68), also known as the "Wiretap Act":

• prohibits the unauthorized, nonconsensual interception of "wire, oral, or electronic communications" by government agencies as well as private parties,
  

 

This being said, the Government, nor any other Federal, State, Local, or Private organization is allowed to watch what you actively download or disseminate over the internet. Your ISP can block the usage of such sites such as Megaupload.com, ThePirateBay.org, and god knows how many other Torrent Sites. But like I said before, if I want to send 2 Gigabytes of PICTURES of my family vacation to the Grand Canyon, then I am going to get warned that I am "PIRATING Proprietary Information or Software" and I will have to pay my ISP an extra $35.00 to dispute it..... when they can not watch what I do in the first place!!!!!!!!

....Perhaps its time to recognize that intellectual property law has gone to far. The whole notion of copyrights and patents is anti-market. It has gone far beyond the original goal of encouraging literary and scientific progress, and has metastacised into siome sort of weird property right.

 

How should developers (take Carenado, for instance) expect their products to be protected without copyright? Or how can a major developer protect unique, groudbreaking code without a patent? I don't see either as restricting the free market--I see them as encouraging developers to create their products under the notion they'll have some protection. That's not to say that the actions of some groups, like the RIAA, are heavy handed. But factoring them out of the equation, there's no financial incentive for innovation without protection in the law for work done on such projects.

 

John

You can't just "factor them out of the equation".

 

Their money, power, and total self interest drives the entire situation. They go after criminals, and seem blissfully unconcerned at all the other fish dragged gasping up onto the beach by their huge and ever growing net.

ME: If I read where the internet providers penalize even one punk who stole something that the rest of us had to work to pay for, it will make my week.

 

YOU: What about people who use P2P torrenting for legitimate purposes? What if my neighbour hacks my wireless network and uses it without my knowledge or permission? What if my niece or nephew come to stay and I let them use my internet connection and they are downloading stuff illegally without my knowledge?

 

What if your neice or nephew puts ski mask over his head and robs a bank using your gun and a video camera records the pistol serial number. You might get blamed as being the actual robber in the bank, that's what.

 

What if your neice or nephew downloads stuff at your house with you knowledge. You might get blamed that's what.

 

This is how our justice system works. Innocent people are convicted in court for crimes they did not do.

 

We still need to provide law enforcing tools to police so that they can catch bank robbers. And we need to deny them other tools out of concerns over privacy. Video cameras and ISP logging usage both intrude on the privacy of every customer/user.

 

Every tool we provride, even the idea itself of having any police at all, will ALWAYS result in innocent people being convicted who otherwise would not. Nothing is perfect. For instance It's always a question about should the gun owner be responsible for any misuse of his gun by someone else because he did provide safe enough security against that happening. Similar question arises with computers and passwords as with guns and locked safes.