That guy IS a joke.

Not poverty – not global terrorism – not human trafficking – not arms dealing or drugs or actual Pirates on the oceans – but file-sharing.

Those menacing file-sharers – they’re going to bring the entire world to it’s knees.

REMEMBER THIS
=============

Fuck you all, and next time go vote, or vote somoene decent.

Its our world, its our Country, dont let the assholes rule it.

Are you ignorant of the fact that filesharing doesn’t deprive artists from the right to earn a living(see Spain, Canada, where personal use filesharing is legal and yet – SHOCK! – artists continue to make a living), or are you merely spewing empty-headed MAFIAA propaganda?

Well, what you quoted came with a context. My point was : how fair would it be to go to Worst Buy and ask to get their stuff for free while still paying for everything else?

If you read the posts I made in the past, you’d know I’m far from being a MAFIAA supporter – they’re stupid greedy b*st*rds. Still, file sharing IS an issue.

I take “expertly avoiding” as a compliment

You should…

an artist to be properly marketed nowadays you NEED good management. You NEED a good agent. You need people on the streets putting your posters up, and not just in the city where you’re from. It’s a lot easier to be an artist when you’re not also trying to run the business side of things too. A painter is supposed to paint, after all.

And all this stuff costs money. For instance, the cost of making an album does not come down to just writing a few songs and recording them with a $50 mic in audacity. I think most people who consider musicians lazy and overpaid clearly have NO understanding at all of the process and cost of recording and promoting an album.

Sure, most artists make close to nothing on album sales and it is precisely because making and promoting an album costs so much…

There’s famine, wars, and a economic crisis on a global scale, yet Sarkozy is worried about file sharing. It boggles the mind.

The people who voted for him should take note, and make sure he doesn’t get into power again in the future.

Will he withdraw frances membership from the Union for his big music palls?

Could’nt think of a nice way of saying it, so there it is.

maybe his wife just isn’t putting out and he’s taking it out on the internet

Also equalling a single society with a global internet is uhm…wrong, stupid, hybris, not applicable..all of the above? :P
Also I always thought the whole concept/idea of society is that it’s up to the MAJORITY to decide and agree upon what they want and then have this represented in the way they rule and live.

Oh wait, turns out it was just the majority of FUNDS that gets to decide. Oops.

Those aren’t studies, those are opinion pieces.

Are you willing to believe that people are more likely to pay for something they already have, in a good move gesture, for the sole sake of doing the right thing and feeling warm and fuzzy about it…. VS…. Seeing a pair of $250 shoes that cost $6 to produce but look AMAZING and omgigottahavethose NOW..

I mean it’s obvious. Sure maybe some people make donations or whatever.. I don’t. I have a kid to feed. When he’s paid for, and my debts are paid for, and my mom’s debts are paid for, and my sister is okay, and I can rest assured that food is covered till the end of my lifetime.. Then.. Then maybe I’ll just freely go giving money away. I’m just not rich enough to give it away without getting something in return that I value. Maybe the donators are doing just that. But I don’t think they see very far in front of them. Maybe that’s better too.. But I bet there’s more of me than there is of them. ;)

And I mean that’s how shopping works. What people are willing to pay for something is totally market driven. Some people see value differently too.. For some the buffet is the most amazing thing ever.. All that food for one low price? While others would rather have quality over quantity, and might pay 10x more for it.

Some people buy things to feel good, or satiate an anxiety, or an addiction, a feeling of importance, a personal goal, vanity, all kinds of reasons. That’s what makes the world go round. When people start saving all their money – economists get worried.

We’re part of a system more interconnected than ever, and everything affects everything. Giving away what could be sold isn’t doing much good I’m afraid. And I mean we’re not talking about blueprints to a well that can save thousands of lives in africa each year.. We’re talking about rich kids from rich families filling up their ipod. Are there not more noble causes to get behind, when speaking of freedom, expression and virtue?

Thanks for your input.

For one, it’s not really depriving the artists of the right to earn a living. You speak of the power of corporations nowadays, and I wholeheartedly agree. I would like to take that into the direction of the artists’ income and point out how much the corporations hamper said income. It’s pretty common knowledge that the record labels barely let the artist make anything from CD sales, so it’s more the corporations that are depriving them of their living than filesharers. Anyway, I kind of digress. To say that filesharers deprive artists of income is to assume that filesharing results in zero sales. Some independent studies have been cited that say that filesharers purchase more media because p2p exposes them to more.

but a lot of artists are generally not the most in tune with what’s going on tech wise

It’s probably a good idea for content creators to be in touch with the latest technological innovation. This way they can be “ahead of the game” and be among the first to take advantage of any new developments that appear. For example: If artists had begun to share their music for free when p2p was first implemented, I think they would be a lot better off and perhaps more people would have followed suit by now. I acknowledge that it isn’t like that, but it should be. :P

I’d also like to add that you expertly avoided the question raised through the muffler analogy by expanding it to “copying everything” which was not the case in Sock’s Manly example, and certainly not with present-day artists…

Are you sure? The last paragraph of my post was devoted to the muffler thing. If you need to, go back and read.

But I kind of see what you’re saying about the car copying. Although I take “expertly avoiding” as a compliment, I should point out that I didn’t actually avoid the question; I simply misunderstood it a little, I suppose. I guess I can properly answer here.

You know, it gets difficult when you switch to infinitely copying the tangible. All the rules that apply to digital copying- value of a copy, ownership of a copy, etc- have to be redefined. How much is something worth when you can copy it for free and yet it is a physical, resellable object? If you copy someone else’s car, who owns the copy? It’s a totally different situation than digital copying. So I’m not sure if I can adequately answer the question, but I can try.

Um, about the car companies. Would it be fair to them to copy a car? I guess it would mostly depend on if a copy had value. If it did, they’d want to keep people from copying their cars, so it could be argued that it would be unfair to them. If it did not, most of their industry would probably be focused on R&D as opposed to actual production, so it wouldn’t be a big deal.

I can speak for my industry, and people are closing, up, shop. Websites are going offline. Hosting companies have seen a 30% decline across the board. Mom and pops websites are pretty much a thing of the past. Credit card billing practices are getting out of hand, being abused by companies trying to dump water from their sinking ships. Updates have stopped at tons of sites, as people figure they’ll cut back all expenses and just ride the last wave in without paddling.

What does that all mean? It means models aren’t being hired, studios aren’t being rented, equipment isn’t being purchased, contracts are being canceled, people are giving up and looking for new work. These are entrepreneurs who have run businesses for 10+ years, looking for any job they can get. The ratio of converting free visitors to paying customers has declined yearly since 2000, but this year fell like a rock. Not normal.

The people who are sticking around are putting up – guess what? Torrent sites, tube sites.. they’re not beating them, they’re joining them. Because that’s maybe the only way to survive.

And the cycle continues. It’s kind of like a devalued currency, where you need 10x the money to buy 1x the goods. It’s giving away the cow instead of selling milk.

I’m telling you all that stuff I just wrote is real, from my experience, no word of a lie. It’s easy to find a report that matches your argument and then say “all arguments are off!” but the reality on the streets is saying something different.

I have a question.

Are you ignorant of the fact that filesharing doesn’t deprive artists from the right to earn a living(see Spain, Canada, where personal use filesharing is legal and yet – SHOCK! – artists continue to make a living), or are you merely spewing empty-headed MAFIAA propaganda?

If I was a gambler, I’d place my money in the latter. Call me cynical.

I’ve long argued that piracy helps. I was a BBS pirate before being an Internet pirate, and even then at the beginning it was just to get things to the BBS’s faster. It wasn’t an instant move here. However it was private. It was very private.

Computers advanced much more rapidly because of piracy. High school kids can’t afford photoshop, premier, these kinds of great tools that creativity is born from.

It had a purpose. It helped. I’m afraid it’s past that.

Sure there are cases where it helps. The indie artist who needs his name out there. The guy who DOES just do it for love, and wants people to listen, see, enjoy.

But the thing is – they can choose to do that themselves. What happens now is that whether they like it or not, their stuff is available for free, everywhere.

When it was just the computer kids who could get the stuff, the imprint on society was small. It was password protected. It was IP protected. It was super frowned upon to the point of expulsion from the scene to sell or even distribute things to less secure places. Those things happened, but it wasn’t the norm.

Nowadays you can just visit a free website, and bypass the system that rewards creativity.

Don’t fool yourself about their profits. Let me explain.

For a living now, I run adult websites. I’ve seen large people in the business say their sales are down over 60% this year. One guy who has always been honest said that through affiliate sales he did over $500,000 last year, and now his forecast for this year is just over $300,000. The economy and the free availability of porn videos on the net is a double whammy this year.

I know it’s hard for you to feel sorry for him, but he works hard. He makes that much because there are people that want what he produces, and enjoy what he offers, and are willing to pay for it. Everyone walks away happy.

When you ask anyone less than 25 or 30 years old nowadays if they pay for porn, they’ll just laugh and say why? It’s all just free, go to this tube, or that tube, or all the same stuff is available at TPB, or the forums where people post every single piece of each site.

Why? Lots of reasons. But the big one? Money my friend.

Google results are dominated by torrent sites, because people link to them. I mean it’s free shit after all, who can blame them. That’s hundreds of thousands of viewers a day, just from the big G.

The business model is simple. Steal everything you can, make it free, and sell OTHER stuff. Like penis pills, and weight gain supplements, energy drinks, medications, scams, all kinds of stuff.

Just look at the alexa rankings of some of these monsters.. Rapidshare, megaupload, all the tube sites.. Lots of them are some of the busiest sites in the world.

They’re busy and popular because people WANT media. People WANT professional quality. People WANT creations. And they love getting a deal. Free? Where.

The net gain to the world of turning all that lust for entertainment into way, way, way less money, for the people willing to step on anyone to get a piece of the action, is one of the most greedy and heinous business models to ever exist.

I’m not sure how you see it as any different. You write very effectively, and your points are good ones, but it’s not the world we live in. It’s an ideal that doesn’t deal with the problems at all. It’s cool if we can all sit around and play guitar around campfires all day, but whose going to work to pay for little billy’s leukemia treatment?

I mean at some point people have to grow up, and I don’t see any older people really defending piracy. Why? It’s always the kids with their ideals, purposely avoiding the problems.

If record labels are so evil, why are artists trying so hard to get signed? For an artist to be properly marketed nowadays you NEED good management. You NEED a good agent. You need people on the streets putting your posters up, and not just in the city where you’re from. It’s a lot easier to be an artist when you’re not also trying to run the business side of things too. A painter is supposed to paint, after all.

And please re-think your idea that media, software, music, all that isn’t tangible. It’s very tangible. Just because it’s digital 1′s and 0′s, it’s certainly arranged in order. It’s not 1′s and 0′s thrown in the air, ranndomly landing in a patter that makes us want to dance. :)

Is Dark Side of the Moon tangible evidence that awesome exists? I like to think so!

The fact that he’s vowed to support HADOPI despite it being ruled unsconstitutional and struck down by the highest legal authority in France, on the other hand, more than just implies that he’s being payed off.

@neoliar
“1. It is not your natural right to steal things. Sorry.”

Sharing isn’t stealing, liar. Try again.

As for the rest of your(as well as Socks Manly’s) fallacious bullshit, it’s easily debunked by the latest filesharing study out of Harvard Business School(see comment #107 for the link).

I quote, “The publication of new books rose
by 66% over the 2002-2007 period. Since 2000, the annual release of new music albums
has more than doubled, and worldwide feature film production is up by more than 30% since 2003. At the same time, empirical research in file sharing documents that consumer welfare increased substantially due to the new technology. ”

As you can see, reality seriously conflicts with your crack smoking delusion that filesharing stifles innovation and discourages the creation of new works.

Book, music, and film production would have DECLINED since the year 2000 if you were even remotely correct. But it hasn’t. To the contrary, the production of creative works has INCREASED as the number of filesharers continues to grow. How do you explain that?

Oh, wait. I’m sorry. You can’t. :D

And I happen to think that it’s really sad that people capitalize on the basic survival needs of others.

Ha come on, you went too far this time : it’s the foundation of our economy and it’s been for centuries. Someone makes or creates something – a house, a car, a movie, bread, clothes etc – and you buy it. As a consequence the person you bought it from is able to afford the stuff he needs.

The problem in this equation is that nowadays the corporations just have too much power, control and interests and get too big a share of the money.

I agree it would be great to abolish this kind of system but it’s not gonna happen any time soon, right?

So why deprive just a certain part of the population – the artists – of the right to earn a living?

I know there are some other ways of earning a living than just selling copies but a lot of artists are generally not the most in tune with what’s going on tech wise or aware of much else than their art…

I generally agree with what you say but this particular statement is just wrong. You may also rather call it utopic.

I’d also like to add that you expertly avoided the question raised through the muffler analogy by expanding it to “copying everything” which was not the case in Sock’s Manly example, and certainly not with present-day artists…

ILL GO ALL THE WAY FOR 3 STRIKES
oh boy did his slut wife put him up for this, that’s the only possible reason he is fighting so hard for it, she was probably like
“listen hear little, no more poonani for you until you fight for my honour”
poor man always was a bit daft

You have a funny replying format, and it took me a minute to figure out whether you were reposting for +1 or responding to what I said. That said… thanks for remaining civil. :)

It’s the whole welfare VS rich people thing played out again. The rich saying get your lazy asses to work, the welfare people saying – where’s my free money.

That doesn’t really have anything to do with filesharing, considering that the vast majority who do it do not do it for profit.

It’s pretty reprehensible to be defending piracy in front of the very creators you admire, while they stop creating in order to survive.

But have they? We still have media. More importantly, we still have new media. People are still writing software (for profit, which I think is sad), making movies, creating music, etc, despite filesharing and despite the fact that it’s been going for years. And more people are saying it’s okay to download their stuff. They’re making that choice voluntarily, so can you really hold it against them?

What I think is reprehensible is the recording industry claiming to represent justice for the artists, when in fact it defends its own interests.

You can blame “big business” all you want, but people need a place to live – and it’s not free.

And I happen to think that it’s really sad that people capitalize on the basic survival needs of others.

It was cool when you could create something and make a living from your creations, but that’s getting a lot harder with everything given away for free, by anonymous individuals – RUNNING THEIR CORPORATIONS.. The torrent sites are businesses too.

I still have yet to see any hard data proving that all torrent sites make huge profits…

I think it’s just a justification for anti-piracy, and a false one at that.

Now explain how file sharing is not stealing

Okay!

Stealing is taking something from someone else. The conventional definition of this is taking someone else’s car, money, sandwich, etc. Filesharing fails this definition because stealing applied to the physical world means you are depriving one person of something. It was in their possession; now it’s in yours. They don’t have it anymore. When applied to the intangible, this does not work because you are simply receiving a copy of something from someone. You do not go into their computer and erase the original file; therefore, you are not stealing from them.

What about the artists, you say? First of all, when you download, you do not “steal” (to use anti-piracy terminology) from the artists, as the artists do not hold the copyrights on their works. The record labels do. The job of the record labels is to distribute and promote the music of the artists that sign onto them- a job that the artists can now do themselves with the Internet. The record labels have an outdated business model that is not compatible with modern technology, and rather than embrace the changing times, they will fight for their lives and their profits. But I digress.

Anti-piracy advocates will say that you are stealing from these labels: that you are “depriving them of a chance to make a gain.” This is fallacious. For one, you cannot steal from someone what they never would have had in the first place. If you tell me that you are going to give me ten billion dollars, and then you decide not to, I can’t have you prosecuted for theft. For the vast majority of downloads, the p2p user would not have purchased the album had he or she not downloaded it; this refers to the entertainment industry’s assumption that one download is one lost sale, which is flawed for the very reason I just stated. Additionally, the “loss of a chance to make a gain” is ridiculous. As long as a company has products for sale that are available at all times to the general public, that company always has a chance to make a gain. Someone can always make the decision to buy from them. At best one can claim that filesharing reduces a company’s chance to make a gain by providing an alternative, and this is not sufficient justification to close down filesharing, considering the many benefits it brings to the common man.

But all in all, the biggest reason that filesharing is not stealing is because the concept of intellectual property, the idea that you can own intangible things, is in itself fallacious.

Your next post about cars and mufflers, condensed for tl;dr purposes

If we could magically copy anything and distribute it like we can digital files, it would be the best thing to ever happen to mankind. There would be no world hunger. There would be no disease crises in third-world countries. Everyone would have everything they ever needed to survive and make the world a better place. It would completely eliminate the need for an economy, which is fundamentally based on the concept of getting to people the things they need but do not have. So how could you say that it wouldn’t be okay to copy a car? You couldn’t say that you were stealing from a car company, because there’s no longer any such thing as money.

As for the muffler? I’d let them use the design. Any such designing on my part would be for the benefit of humanity as a whole, as opposed to my own commercial gain. Being commercial companies, Honda and Toyota would probably profit from my design and my work, but that’s just a consequence of how our system is. The point is that my design would help society, and that’s what really matters. After all, I couldn’t really go after them for stealing my idea- that is in the same ballpark as intellectual property.

However when you start making copies, things get hectic.

Sure, if you could COPY your car, then it might be easier. You care much less about the copy, because you still have your car.

Fact is, you worked hard to buy your car, it’s yours, and you care what happens to it. You also require or desire the use of it.

How is this any different?

If you COULD copy your car, do you think it would be fair to the car companies? I mean they can copy cars too right? But they did design, develop, manufacture, produce, market, and sell the car after all.

More specifically, let’s say you developed a muffler that was quieter, more efficient, and looked amazing. You spent a great part of a few years working on this, hoping you could bring it to market. You know there’s a demand, people will like your muffler. But then Honda and Toyota see it, and just copies it exactly, and puts it on all their new cars. They can sell them for less than you can make them for.

How would you feel?

“You are disgusting. Right there you are saying “Everyone who shares something in order to help their neighbor is a thief because they are depriving someone else of profits.” If someone asked me for a copy of a program because he needed it to perform some task, I would be wrong to say no. It would be terrible of me to say “I apologize, but such behavior would violate the exclusive rights of the copyright holders. You are legally required to purchase a copy of the program in order to satisfy intellectual property laws.” I’d say “Sure” and hand him a flash drive. Or, on another note: If my friend gives me a cookie, are we acting immorally or breaking the law because neither of us are paying the food industry for use of the cookie? I’m going to reiterate another basic point you haven’t been able to understand: Sharing is a fundamental part of prosperous society.

You can blame “big business” all you want, but people need a place to live – and it’s not free.

You call it a “slave to a paycheck”, I call it a “slave to a roof, running water, and electricity”.

You call it a “financial reward”, I call it “sustenance and survival”

Look out your window (if you’re not in your parents basement) there’s a real world out there. People need to survive mang. It was cool when you could create something and make a living from your creations, but that’s getting a lot harder with everything given away for free, by anonymous individuals – RUNNING THEIR CORPORATIONS.. The torrent sites are businesses too.

Now explain how file sharing is not stealing.. Buying a CD does not give you a 50,000 user license to send it all your myspace friends. Don’t tiptoe – it’s piracy. And even if you don’t do that, lots of people do. Just because you don’t crash your car when you drink, doesn’t make it right to drive around drunk.

—-

“Come ON! Apparently you know nothing of the concept of selflessness, so I’m going to go ahead and explain it for you. You see, not everyone in the world is a slave to the paycheck, as big business would like everyone to be. Though they be comparatively rare creatures, there actually are people out there who do things out of the goodness of their heart, and for the betterment of society as a whole, as opposed to because there is some financial reward in it for them. There are more important things in the world than money.”

It’s the whole welfare VS rich people thing played out again. The rich saying get your lazy asses to work, the welfare people saying – where’s my free money.

Piracy doesn’t just kill motivation – it kills the ability for many people to devote their life to their passion, because they need to do something else to make money and feed their families.

It’s pretty reprehensible to be defending piracy in front of the very creators you admire, while they stop creating in order to survive.

Congrats to all the winners.

that’s what she said! ZING!