Pirate Bay owners sentenced to prison

There are only people and their habits and convictions in this.

1) There are people who never, ever, pirate anything (not sure if that's the majority)
2) There are people who only rarely pirate, usually only the most expensive programs (the majority probably fit in here)
3) There are people who pirate relatively often, because it's easy and they don't fear any repercussions
4) There are people who pirate non-stop, usually on a daily basis and never buy anything that they could pirate.

For everyone who does pirate, there are roughly 3 more subdivisions:

1) People who feel guilty about pirating and don't do it that often
2) People whose gluttony overrides their guilt, but they still occasionally feel their conscience kicking in
3) People who are convinced that pirating is their God-given right, that pirating shouldn't even be called that but rather "public service" and that anyone who disagrees is the enemy.

None of the above has really changed since the flea-market piracy times, and I doubt it ever will. And every group has plenty of material to support their views on piracy (some much more intellectually dishonest, ridiculous or simply ignorant than others).

You'll never have a consensus on this issue just like you'll never have a human society without crime. No matter how much everyone has, someone always wants more, or what the neighbour has. It's human nature.

 

Last I checked, you can buy more than 95% of the music on the market legitimately online today (for some time already, actually), but that hasn't made any difference as far as music piracy goes. The only thing that pirates care about is getting what they want for free, and that's the beginning and the end of the discussion for those who want to be honest. Obviously; once people get used to stealing for free on a daily basis, why would they go back to paying even a cent per song when there are no repercussions for not doing it?

 

The only difference is that the theft is digital instead of physical... and in the era where we're dealing less and less with software in physical boxes and where legal online software downloads are getting increasingly more popular, the distinction will become less and less obvious. Web stores selling game downloads don't need to keep a physical inventory, for instance, so you could basically argue that if you torrented their entire catalogue of 1000 games, you wouldn't have physically stolen anything - but when the entire catalogue of games is digital, that makes no difference as far as the reality of the theft is concerned. Legitimate online game downloads have a price, and it's not "free". An online web store has dozens of other expenses to cover instead of the physical space needed for box storage. And while obviously a large number of pirates would never buy something that they can get for free now, a significant number of pirates of convenience would. And that's the lost sales that count.

 

For every research or statistic defending piracy, there are 20 with findings directly opposite. It's rather pointless to trade such links; you can just run a search on "piracy" in our news forum, or google "file sharing negative". Or read this for a quick summary.

Back then the intent WAS to make it possible to import BG2 chars into NWN... but then 3e came along and they decided that since they couldn't easily port over 2e chars, that they wouldn't do it at all. This wasn't an intentional lie at the time; the idea was only scrapped later on because of technical limitations.

I'm not sure where you've seen that the STORY of BG2 would continue in NWN, because AFAIK, that was never the plan or advertised.

Who made it pretty clear that downloading is only a crime if you intend to resell? Because that's never really been the case legally, only formally. In former Yugoslavia, piracy was the national sport; everyone did it, there were hundreds of pirate stores selling everything from games to music to movies. Everyone was convinced that this was perfectly legal simply by the virtue that everyone is doing it and the police aren't cracking down on it. But the reality is, this attitude was only encouraged and not sanctioned by the police because we lived in a relatively communist/socialist bubble of the first order, where the notion that everything that you can steal without much notice was up for the taking.

That attitude started changing very shortly after Yugoslavia fell apart and Slovenia gained its independence. The pirates were hunted down, illegal stores were shut down and whereas in the past piracy pervaded the society (heck, they streamed copyrighted games over radio for people to record for their ZX spectrums), it soon became an extreme rarity. Of course, once broadband became the norm, it all just moved online where it wasn't that easy to crack down on, but that's another story.

Point being, piracy didn't "become" illegal. It always was, it just wasn't sanctioned in some countries in the past and in some it still isn't much today. But every country that wants to be taken seriously has to respect copyright law on the national level or be regarded 3rd world by others in that respect.

That's a really lame and dishonest excuse. It's like saying that if you take 3 boxes that fall off trucks every day for years that no one is losing anything. At a first glance, maybe not. But the net result is that over time you amass a gigantic collection of material you haven't paid for (which has a negative effect on the economy and everyone involved in the making of the product you "obtained") and that eventually the trucks start driving around nearly empty or completely stop, because instead of buying, the majority of the people are just "picking up" what's falling off them.

The excuse "I'd never buy any of that anyway" is unbelievably dishonest as well. If your only option for acquiring the same entertainment was to obtain it legally, you would buy it or borrow it legally one way or another and not become a hermit that would just stare at blank walls all day.

Either you'd buy it directly, watch it on TV, listen to it on radio or borrow it from the library or some other legal way. All of these ways involve someone paying for the material at some point.

You wouldn't get ALL of the same stuff that you pirate with a click, sure, but only the stuff you craved the most or that you could afford. Just as with all the other goods that we usually don't steal to obtain (food, cars, etc.)

Eh, no. That's just your false perception, which I'm sure any of our resident lawyers can confirm.

As I said before, it's all about (public) perception:

According to a poll, 75% of young voters in Sweden (18-20) support file sharing when presented with the statement:

“I think it is OK to download files from the Net, even if it is illegal.”

Of the respondents, 38% said they "adamantly agreed" while 39% said they "partly agreed".

* * *​

The culture of entitlement is the twisted part here, not the copyright laws.

 

I'll post a link nonetheless. This article came up in SP's News forum a while back. It is a lengthy but worthy read.

It is hard to prove whether piracy on the 'net hurts or benefits copyright owners. But as long as copyright owners do not willingly share their content on the internet for free, then the content - whether music, literature, movies or computer software - should not be shared. The content is the intellectual property of the owners, and they have the right to decide whether and how and at what price it should be available to the public.

I think that more or less nails it. From my point of view:

You* don't have a "right" to play a computer game just because it has been created. You can purchase a license for the game at the terms set forth by the developers. If you don't like the terms or the price, don't play the game.

* "You" is not aimed at any person or persons but used strictly in the third person here!

You don't have a "right" to watch a movie just because it has been shot. You can watch it in the cinema or from a legally purchased DVD, Blu-Ray disk, or similar. Please observe the terms of the copyright holders. It is their property.

You don't have a "right" to read a book just because it has been written. You can buy the book at a legal outlet, borrow it at a library, or go without reading it.

In other words, intellectual property is the property of the owners, and they hold exclusive right to the content - to decide how and when to make it available to the public, in what form, and at what price. If you don't like their terms, don't buy the content. If you think their way of making the content available is misinformed, or their price is too high, it is NOT your "right" to "set things straight" or "educate the stupid owners" by stealing their content.

 

100 years ago the situation was obviously very different than it is today. Books were expensive merchandise that the lower classes could not afford and going back and forth to the library was considered convenient. Today, the overwhelming majority of books can be purchased as cheap paperbacks and we consider convenience to have books shipped to our doorstep and put on the shelf to read whenever we feel like it, not going back and forth to the library and worrying about late fees.

Also, you're missing the point that libraries are big book buyers; they buy big, and they buy often. Popular books wear out and need to be replaced regularly. Libraries also serve as marketing spots for various book publishers, which often give good deals on their books to libraries which make an effort to promote them. Libraries are also additionally funded by donations and in most cases in Europe the state, because they also serve a social and educational function. And library/late fees as well, naturally. All of this is profitable in the end because it involves money changing hands. The only money involved in online piracy is the one that pirates keep getting and transferring to the Cayman islands or their Swiss bank accounts. I hope you're not so naive as to think that those guys aren't making wads of cash. Merely running an international operation on the scale of Pirate Bay costs bundles of cash every month.

I seriously can't believe that anyone intelligent could write something so ignorant, so I can't see it as anything else but intentional dishonesty. If you really believe that "A produces and B takes it for free, no strings attached" is a sustainable business model then you just don't have a clue. Seriously. Just how many more new chairs do you think would keep being made if each one that come out would be stolen the second it appeared?

Ah, and I assume it's everyone's God-given right to decide whether the chair in the salon is worth buying, or just carrying away for free. Because people in general much prefer to pay for something that they can steal without repercussions.

Because the issue here isn't buying or not - you're arguing that everyone's entitled to steal what they don't want to buy, not to decline buying it.

 

It's not the same degree of responsibility obviously and if Google (or any other search engine) started censoring all the illegal content on the web, half of the web would go blank. Where would you start and end? Ban anything saying or linking to murder, rape, assassination, bomb making, etc.? Those crimes are far more severe and yet no one is holding search engines accountable for them.

Google's only showing what's there, not making any illegal content. It's the sites that produce illegal content that are responsible for it. Turning caching off for any known pirate sites would be doable, sure... but by that logic they would have to do it for any other remotely criminal content as well and most people wouldn't be happy about that. Neither is it really feasible to police the entire web like that.