Illegal downloaders 'face UK ban'- VM to Pilot Scheme

downloading copyrighted material is stealing, full stop. no ifs, no buts; the only thing making it different is the conscience of the person performing the act and whether they listen to it.

MAJOR; you could be right in saying you wouldn't buy music anyway. Since i've stopped stealing music, i have not bought a single album and stick to downloading new music podcasts like NYUB. its a great way to get my fix and still completely legal. but, you are completely misguided. downloading an album and walking into a shop and slipping it into your coat ARE the same thing - much as i hate to agree with that stupid annoying bloody unskippable video that plays on every (legally owned FFS!) DVD i've bought.

Stop being a complete twunt and start rewarding people who enrich your life with music.

 

See the problem with that argument is that many would say they have no problem rewarding the artists but are sick to the back teeth paying the record labels. Not entirely sure of the validity of that argument, with out the record company's many great artists wouldn't be discovered. However at the moment the record labels have a big problem since they seem to be pushing commercial (ie sells well) **** (x-factor etc) and not actually discovering new talent. Thus they have a image problem, ironic for an industry which manufactures images as much as music.

 

Definitely. Except, well, you're wrong. But apart from that, definitely! Please to be looking up the seperate definitions for stealing, and for breach of copyright, before again posting in this thread.

And again, you're wrong. Downloading an album and walking into a shop and taking a CD aren't the same thing. I'm not commenting on the morality or amorality of either act, or whether one is worse than the other, or any of that. But they're not the same acts under law. One is stealing. One is breach of copyright. Insisting otherwise just makes you look like you're someone who's too stupid to understand the distinction.

Damn straight! Download the album, buy the T-shirt!

 

Or download the album and go to the concert...
(and buy the T-shirt if you really feel the need ).

 

i will put the next scenarios and you will choose which one is the best:

A) everything continues how it is now, piracy is common, music producers and artists are getting millions of dollars on crap music (artists earn most of their money with concerts and direct sales), ISPs evolve and increase their internet speed and lower their prices because of demand, all around the world industries that are parallel to piracy (like blank media makers) survive, expand and grow and feed thousands of people, Hard drive makers tend to make their hard drives bigger and cheaper for the general public (you need a big ass hard drive to put those movies, MP3s and games....).

B) people stop pirating, music producers and artists continue getting millions of dollars on crap music (artists earn most of their money with concerts and direct sales), ISPs don't have a reason to evolve their speeds because people don't need that much internet speed (around here people that used to have 16Mb internet connections at 35€ will lower it to 2Mb that is far enough for everyday stuff and pay 15€, its cheaper and its enough speed, do you think those 20 € would go to media?) now that there is nothing to download and nothing generally interesting to see..... really like 90% of all youtube videos would disappear because they have something that is "strikingly similar" to something that is copyrighted, internet prices stagnate, all around the world industries that are parallel to piracy crumble putting thousands of people into unemployment, impetus to make bigger hard drives for the general public would slow down.

C) music producers and artists embrace the digital age, change their ways to sell music to people, the way that people want it and earn billions (a la alloffmp3), copyright and patent law changes to avoid sample trolls and patent trolls and make it so that in X time the media and patents becomes public domain, ISPs get a new impetus to improve their speeds and connections and prices, all around the world industries that are parallel to piracy (that is now smaller because of the price and easiness of getting legal media) survive, expand and grow and feed thousands of people, these would in time evolve into companies that sell stuff that is now public domain for very low prices or simply give them away free....., hard drive makers would have a reason to make their hard drives bigger and faster for the general public.

A) is now
B) is the RIAA utopia
C) is what it should be

IIRC copyright laws exist to protect the artists and their families from real pirates, the scum, the people that take their work and sell them as their own. these days copyright laws and patents exist to protect large companies and stagnate human evolution.....

 

They get enough money, I'm sure one person in the UK isn't going to affect their £5m a year income.

And to be honest, in the last month I've spent about £100 on games. So If I can save money on albums, I will, and nothing will stop me.

And the whole slipping album under coat thing, it's not the same, your stealing +1 product everytime someone does that, but torrenting, you sharing 1 product around the whole world, it's totally different, if you like it or not. It's not my fault that some people hear spend money on music when other people get £100 worth of albums every week for free. Your choice, not mine.

Silver Shamrock - How about post something useful instead of wasting your time with smiles, get a hobby or something.

 

he is, as we say, "part of the furniture" and more experienced in this forum..... he is also correct when he says to you to post something more than , it is kind of in the rules, "try to post useful stuff." .

 

Greetings!

Scenario C would be a complete failure.
Freeloaders would keep parasitising the entire system*, thats what they do now and would continue doing.

*- Artists/developers/creators, labels/producers/publishers and, of course, the paying consumer.

 

so what system do you propose?

 

I agree with you view that the music and movie industries needs to reinvent the concept of digital copyright. However, it is a bit naive to believe that piracy drives the hard disk market and ISP growth. Of course, if given the evidence of the contrary, I will probably change my mind.

 

think about it, why do you need 24Mb connections and 1Tb hard drives for, if you don't have anything to download? i don't know if the influence is that big but i for one would lower my internet speed, pay less and download far less if piracy stopped, hard drives.... well.... if piracy stopped then i think there would be lots of people with Tb hard drive arrays with lots of surplus space... i think its is like..... why would i want a ferrari if i lived in the woods were roads are not flat? why do i need a huge truck if all the driving i am going to do is from home to the job and reverse everyday on flat roads?

 

Piracy has not enough impact in either market to show the changes you are describing. Firstly, the main source of income of ISPs and HDD manufacturers do not come from 24MB connections and 1TB drives. This is because most consumers are distributed around the budget to mid end of any product, the number decaying exponentially with price. Very high end gear tends to get snapped up by very few people with little market share in comparison. Lets hypothetically consider all the high end users to be file sharing maniacs, who exclusively use their HDDs and bandwidth for piracy. If you kill piracy, the number of customers the ISP and HDD makers have lost is few. So there wouldn't be "lots of people with Tb hard drives arrays" all of a sudden doing nothing.

However, here's the question: do many of the high end powerusers use their HDDs and internet exclusively for P2P in the first place? I doubt it. Even if piracy was eradicated somehow, they would still buy big HDDs and fast connections, probably for games and stuff like that. I mean, Bit-Tech users are a good example here. I bet loads of you here have big HDDs and fast internet, but not all of you file share in the first place. Even if you do file share, if P2P was banned, would you downgrade? A few might, but the majority probably wouldn't I guess.

 

Greetings!

For any system to be viable, full scale pirate organizations and home based freeloaders need to either disappear or dwindle.
I think we all agree that pirate organizations are harmful to any system well being, however, the current surge in freeloading is just as harmful. Just because it isnt commercial oriented doesnt mean it doesnt harm the system. If someone owns a freeloaded digital copy it is less likely to spend any kind of resource in geting a legal obtained copy.

The current system will adapt to new distribution possibilities, probably slower than some would like, but will adapt. Give it time.
Some experiments will test the waters (evolutions of Steam and iTunes), some will fail, others will prosper. For instances, I hope the $69,95+VAT for CoD4 experiment bought from Steam fails miserably and that iTunes eventually compensates more the artist than a CD sale.

PS:
As a side note, I find... interesting comparing this comments thread for an Illegal downloaders to be cut off by UK ISPs article to the comments thread of France leads the way in common sense article.

 

dragontail i was not implying that they would die, i was implying that the drive to go bigger and faster would slow down, i don't know about you but here i see people buy mid/low/crap range computers with 250, 320 or 500 Gb hard drives, unlimited download capacity (in Madeira download limits are not common) and fast speeds (8Mb+) and these people pirate like hell, i mean, of every person, from idiot to geek, that i know....hmmm .... i don't know anyone that does not download at least one peace of copyrighted m edia or did not buy a bootleg DVD from somewhere, or copied a rented DVD/cassette/Game/CD, most of the computers i fix have piolet, emule, frostwire, limewire, some sort of torrent software, all of them are newbs in the area of computing and their computers are all crap (sometimes i do fix some fantastic computers, lately its been laptops, with hard drives full to the brim), except in Hard drive size and internet speeds....... have you ever seen a P4 1500 with a 320Gb secondary hard drive full of pirated media, on the hands of a bus driver that knows almost nothing about computers? i have fixed it and lots like it, simple and cheap machines with big/huge hard drives, hell.... there are loads of people that i know that have internet only for downloading stuff.......

if all of these people i know stopped pirating they would reduce their internet speed and the amount of money the spend on internet, medium range computers would not come with tons of hard drive space (most medium/low ranges around here come with 320+Gb hard drives), it all depends on the perspective, there in the UK my view might look flawed, but here it is very real.

About internet gaming, when i had 2Mb speed internet i used to game a lot and my lag was minuscule, so why do you need 24Mb connection for gaming?

edit: impar so you are going with
D: spend billions (or trillions if you consider China) of dollars to make piracy disappear everywhere on earth, make people wait for the media makers to evolve at their own very slow pace (even with fire up their asses they don't evolve fast enough to avoid going dodo), and hope everything else wont change.

in the meanwhile why don't you teach people to cover their ears when they hear a "public performance of copyrighted material" of an idiot that is in the bus or in his car with the sound cranked up high?

 

Hmm interesting. I guess piracy a big problem in Madeira?

 

not really, i mean, its rampant, but shops are selling as much or more than they used to, the only thing that is closing media stores around here are high prices, low wages, criminal competition between stores and shopping centres that strangle small shops..... ow.... and the euro also helps

people also blame piracy, but, i forgot to say, most of the top downloaders i know also spend tons of money on the real deal, they have walls covered with films and music..... the more modest wallet people tend to have fewer real stuff, but they do buy that shakira album, or britney album.... or skip some meals at school for a month and buy a game.......

 

Greetings!

Just so we dont lose track of the scenarios:
A- Current situation
B- Piracy and freeloading stop entirely, system doesnt change
C- Digital Age evolution, system evolves quickly
D- War to piracy and freeloding, system evolves slowly

Well, D is very similar to A, currently piracy is being fought, freeloading is geting the first blows and the system is evolving, slowly but evolving non the less.
B is unrealist, the system feels the need to evolve.
C is utopic.

You must give time for the system (creator, publisher and paying consumer) to adapt to new realities and evolve at its own pace.

Why should I?

 

..... they had like.... 10 years of scorching fire (growing piracy) under their asses and they have evolved very slowly... how do you think they will evolve with nothing pushing them? its like putting a big, fat, slow, blind and deaf cow on the train tracks and thinking it wont be turned into burgers when the next train comes.....

well, if you are outside and hear to a random person (that is not from your immediate family or close friends) hearing to his music on his media player/radio (may it be very loud or loud enough for you to listen to it) you are in effect hearing a "public performance" which is a form of Copyright infringement, i mean, look at your music cds, they say "no public performances" or something like that.....

 

I think he may have thrown his toys.

TBH with regards to your point about hard disks, it may have an small effect but honestly its companies like google and Lucas arts who drive the hard drive market. I can't remember the source but the number of terrabytes generated by both of those companies a day would dwarf what you could download in a life time.

 

Greetings!

They might take another 10 years to get this right. And in 10 years a new change might be dawning in the horizon. Evolution is a never ending proccess.

If it is too high and it bothers me, I will tell him/her to lower the volume. Apart from that, I have no authority.

PS:

A quick googling gives this article from 2006:
If we take into account that all this information is compressed (for example, the crawled data has compression rate of 11%, so 800 TB become 88 TB), Google uses for all the services mentioned before 220 TB. It's also interesting to note that the size of the raw imagery from Google Earth is almost equal to the size of the compressed web pages crawled by Google.
There is still Microsoft, Yahoo, Ask.com, etc.