We have failed. The internet will still be censored.

[Exentenzed]

Well they won't ever stop piracy because they aren't going after the problem. The problem is themselves. It's the endless sequels, remakes, crappy movies. Them charging 20 bucks for a new dvd/br movie, them trying to stop netflix by raping them, the charging 9 bucks for a movie ticket.

That might have been part of what started the problem, but piracy have become too common. Alot of work have gone into creating programs and systems to accomodate easy downloads of just about anything nowadays and as such i don't think it will be that simple to remove piracy all togheter anymore. I think it's just to late for that even though i think it would help greatly.

[Sunsetforgotten]

This is the problem with a large government that dictates way too much of individuals lives. I understand the losses amongst companies with piracy, yet I find it hard to pity them. 40 years ago, gas companies were happy getting 20 dollars every two months for gas. Now they want 20 a week. The same goes for gaming. They suddenly raised the bar on how much games cost, yet offer nothing more expansive than what is already out there. Many games are based on the same engines as others, just with updates (Madden, NBA2k, CoD, Battlefield, GoW). They can't expect people to continue to pay ridiculous prices for entertainment and not try to find a means of deterring the expense.

[LemonRising]

Companies aren't losing money because of piracy, they're losing money because they refuse to adapt to a changing society.
Oh and they're also losing money because they're paying politicians to support things like SOPA and PIPA. lol

SOPA and PIPA aren't made to protect artists and the people that create things, they're made for the companies who are already rolling in money. They're made to control the internet, a thing that the government has no real control over, and that scares them.

I respect steam so much, because instead of making it harder to play game by adding anti-piracy ****, they simply said "we'll just make something easy to use for gamers". They adapted, and for that they have a huge user base, and people buying games.

[paecmaker]

I respect steam so much, because instead of making it harder to play game by adding anti-piracy ****, they simply said "we'll just make something easy to use for gamers". They adapted, and for that they have a huge user base, and people buying games.

Technically isnt steam also an anti piracy thing(apart that you can buy games online) You can only have the game on your account witch means you NEED internet to play and install also it means that you cant borrow or even buy games together, and so on, Steam may be good but its still a disguised anti piracy thing, Im not saying its bad cause I also like steam, there are many things you cand do but still. At least thats what I think.

[BobTD]

Im proud to say that this topic has sparked enough interest to validate itself. The thread is not about a single blog post, rather the importance of being informed and taking a stance on an issue. The blog post I felt summed up an important point that would have taken me a very long time to make myself, on a limited time schedule.

Why is this listed under serious news?

Its under serious news because opinions about the issue even after the bills have failed is clearly relevant to our daily lives. Do you see how many posts this thread generated? And most people actually contributed to it, unlike you. =/

Here is the thing. The bills that where proposed at their heart where put forward and backed by companies with an agenda. The real issue was never pirating. Thats almost an entirly different issue, one that was clearly never addressed by either bill.


But seeing as thats all some members can seem to think about when it comes to this topic I feel its fair to address the problem, I think this sums up my opinion about illegal downloading pretty well:

That main issue, we're told over and over again, is "piracy" and specifically "rogue" websites. And, let's be clear: infringement is a problem. But the question is what kind of problem is it? Much of the evidence suggests that it's not an enforcement problem and it's not a legal problem. Decades of evidence from around the globe all show the same thing: making copyright law or enforcement stricter does not work. It does not decrease infringement at all -- and, quite frequently, leads to more infringement. That's because the reason that there's infringement in the first place is that consumers are being under-served. Historically, infringement has never been about "free," but about indicating where the business models have not kept up with the technology.

Thus, the real issue is that this is a business model problem. As we've seen over and over and over again, those who embrace what the internet enables, have found themselves to be much better off than they were before. They're able to build up larger fanbases, and to rely on various new platforms and services to make more money.

And, as we've seen with near perfect consistency, the best way, by far, to decrease infringement is to offer awesome new services that are convenient and useful. This doesn't mean just offering any old service -- and it certainly doesn't mean trying to limit what users can do with those services. And, most importantly, it doesn't mean treating consumers like they were criminals and "pirates." It means constantly improving the consumer experience. When that consumer experience is great, then people switch in droves. You can, absolutely, compete with free, and many do so. If more were able to without restriction, infringement would decrease. If you look at the two largest contributors to holding back "piracy" lately, it's been Netflix and Spotify. Those two services alone have been orders of magnitude more successful in decreasing infringement than any new copyright law. Because they compete by being more convenient and a better experience than infringement.

Finally, even if you disagree with all of that, and believe that the problem is enforcement, SOPA and PIPA, won't be effective in dealing with that. The internet always has a way of routing around "damage" no matter how hard people try to stop it, and the approach put forth by these bills is a joke. It's hard to find anyone with technology skills who thinks that they will be effective. Every "blockade" has an easy path around it, and the supposed "anti-circumvention" rule in SOPA will never deal with the more obvious paths around things like DNS blocking (use a different DNS or a perfectly legal foreign VPN system). The private right of action efforts are also mistargeted. They're based on the premise that infringement is done for monetary reasons. It's amusing that just a few years ago, these same industries insisted that music and movie fans never wanted to pay anything any more, but now they're claiming that these same people are paying for cyberlockers all the time? That's simply not credible. And if there's so much money to be made, the studios and labels would be opening their own cyberlockers. Either way, we've watched this game of Whac-a-mole for over a decade. It doesn't work. Every site that is shut down leads to half a dozen new ones that spring up. This is not how you tackle a problem: by making the same mistake made over and over again in the past.

Why SOPA are bad.

[Trunks]

Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. Steam is an example of a system that stops a good amount of piracy and actually works. I personally am not a huge fan of steam, I rather have the disc. Though I do register my games through steam that way, if i lose the disc or cd key or something I'll be able to play still.

[LemonRising]

Technically isnt steam also an anti piracy thing(apart that you can buy games online) You can only have the game on your account witch means you NEED internet to play and install also it means that you cant borrow or even buy games together, and so on, Steam may be good but its still a disguised anti piracy thing, Im not saying its bad cause I also like steam, there are many things you cand do but still. At least thats what I think.

Well really, to be an internet pirate you need internet too ;p So I really don't think thats an issue.
Also, some people still share their games on steam, they'll give someone their username and pass, let em download and play a game. So not being able to borrow isn't much of an issue either.
Some people just prefer having the physical copy, and those people probably aren't 'pirates' unless maybe they're a thief who steals physical copies from stores.

And on borrowing, Neil Gaiman made the point that piracy is kind of like sharing/borrowing books. For some people that's all it really is. Sharing. A huge digital library. They're just borrowing something, and if they really like it, they'll buy it.
Lemme link the Neil Gaiman thing..
http://youtu.be/0Qkyt1wXNlI

“When the web started, I used to get really grumpy with people because they put my poems up. They put my stories up. They put my stuff up on the web. I had this belief, which was completely erroneous, that if people put your stuff up on the web and you didn’t tell them to take it down, you would lose your copyright, which actually, is simply not true.

And I also got very grumpy because I felt like they were pirating my stuff, that it was bad. And then I started to notice that two things seemed much more significant. One of which was… places where I was being pirated, particularly Russia where people were translating my stuff into Russian and spreading around into the world, I was selling more and more books. People were discovering me through being pirated. Then they were going out and buying the real books, and when a new book would come out in Russia, it would sell more and more copies. I thought this was fascinating, and I tried a few experiments. Some of them are quite hard, you know, persuading my publisher for example to take one of my books and put it out for free. We took “American Gods,” a book that was still selling and selling very well, and for a month they put it up completely free on their website. You could read it and you could download it. What happened was sales of my books, through independent bookstores, because that’s all we were measuring it through, went up the following month three hundred percent

I started to realize that actually, you’re not losing books. You’re not losing sales by having stuff out there. When I give a big talk now on these kinds of subjects and people say, “Well, what about the sales that I’m losing through having stuff copied, through having stuff floating out there?” I started asking audiences to just raise their hands for one question. Which is, I’d say, “Okay, do you have a favorite author?” They’d say, “Yes.” and I’d say, “Good. What I want is for everybody who discovered their favorite author by being lent a book, put up your hands.” And then, “Anybody who discovered your favorite author by walking into a bookstore and buying a book raise your hands.” And it’s probably about five, ten percent of the people who actually discovered an author who’s their favorite author, who is the person who they buy everything of. They buy the hardbacks and they treasure the fact that they got this author. Very few of them bought the book. They were lent it. They were given it. They did not pay for it, and that’s how they found their favorite author. And I thought, “You know, that’s really all this is. It’s people lending books. And you can’t look on that as a loss of sale. It’s not a lost sale, nobody who would have bought your book is not buying it because they can find it for free.”

What you’re actually doing is advertising. You’re reaching more people, you’re raising awareness. Understanding that gave me a whole new idea of the shape of copyright and of what the web was doing. Because the biggest thing the web is doing is allowing people to hear things. Allowing people to read things. Allowing people to see things that they would never have otherwise seen. And I think, basically, that’s an incredibly good thing.”
— Neil Gaiman on Copyright, Piracy, and the Commercial Value of the Web

So there's an interesting look on things.

[CraeSC111]

I would have to concur with the author. About half of the books I have were originally ones I had borrowed or found for."free". I buy the book to support the author.