I'm not saying piracy should be legal; the logical decision should be and has always been to make the act illegal; however, the disproportionate punishments currently handed out for pirates is unjustified. Catch a pirate, make them pay the original cost of the products they acquired illegally and that should be it. Suing families into bankruptcy ruins lives and does little to help the situation.

I don't believe it is morally wrong to pirate, but it's also something which should not be legalized.

It's called a deterrent. The higher the risk the lower the chance people will pirate. People aren't gonna take the risk if the punishment is just paying the original cost. Whereas people will be too scared to risk it if the punishment is losing all their money.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Jan 24 2012, 5:20 am by Oh_Man.

So is killing anyone for any crime committed.

It doesn't mean it's justified.

The reason they charge a lot is mainly because our legal system is not set up in a way to extort small amounts of money from large amounts of people. We have all sorts of rules of evidence and discovery that need to be undertaken before a judgement can be ruled. Now simply being able to accuse someone of piracy and charging them money would result in extortion, but a simplified system really needs to be created to deal with this sort of thing. Similarly, getting the type of evidence required to convict someone isn't straightforward either, due to the nature of the internet and the way piracy is undertaken. In that respect, going after the distribution networks in the case of Napster and MegaUpload is the easiest and most effective way to do it (global internet traffic has apparently dropped by 4% following the closure of megaupload).

People commit copyright violations for a huge plethora of reasons, but one of the main enabling ones is the belief in the anonymity of their actions, the unlikeliness of being caught/convicted and the general disparity in power/harm between the pirate and the artist who is the victim.

Most people break laws every week, if not every day, for example driving without a seatbelt. We don't see people being hauled into court and fined $100k for not wearing a seatbelt, but at the same time not wearing a seatbelt is a genuine victimless crime (the only person you can hurt is yourself). In contrast, pirating, in aggregate, definitely does hurt the artists/creators, even if it is difficult to say whether any individual act of piracy has specifically hurt them.

Probably it should be handled the way that shoplifting is as it's probably the closest analogy when it comes to breaking the law, in terms of actual damages suffered, rate of occurrence and difficulty of detection. There are people who shoplift thousands of dollars of stuff worth at a time, people who shoplift continually but small amounts, other people who only do it occasionally or rarely and still others who shoplift stuff to on-sell it.

@SAC

Well it doesn't mean it isn't justified either. How do you determine what the correct deterrent is for a particular crime?

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Jan 24 2012, 9:14 am by Oh_Man.

I didn't say it was justified, I said that's the reason it happens.

Of course you don't see the media corporations clamouring for more reasonable / special court systems they could use, instead you see them going after ridiculously punitive sums of money and defending them to the nth degree, dropping any cases they look like they're losing lest it creates an unfavourable precedent, using dodgy John/Jane Doe blanket accusations and over the top legislation like SOPA.

Wait so now we've established that piracy is not stealing. The next step is to determine why one sort of duplication is illegal (piracy) whereas another isn't (legal free downloads and torrents). And indeed, how someone can own a particular configuration of bytes such that no one else can have that configuration of bytes legally. I cannot fathom how this is possibly wrong.

*sigh*

Because in one case the owner of the rights to the content has given you permission (usually in exchange for money, but not always) to download/copy the content. Often this is called a license.

Because our legal system says that that specific configuration of bytes (or the work that that specific configuration of bytes represents) took an act of creative thought to produce. Our legal system protects the result of creative thought (called 'works') with copyright. Copyright says that the creator of the work is in full control of what happens with that work; they may choose to put the work onto DVD format and charge you $10 for it with the provision that you don't format-shift or duplicate the DVD or have private screenings etc.

Is copyright "moral"? In the sense that people often create works with the expectation of receiving recompense for them, if you access that work without giving recompense then you have violated the implicit trust by the creator of the work. Going by the accepted social conventions of the day, everyone understands that you are 'supposed' to buy DVDs, not pirate them for free off the internet. Therefore you're essentially breaking the accepted cultural/societal contract that exists between creators of works and the consumers. Is breaking contracts bad? What does the bible say about breaking contracts?

Your train of thought falls apart with the idea of a societal contract. There is no "societal contract". I certainly didn't sign one.

You sure did, when you decided to enjoy someone else's creative work and there was that big disclaimer on it saying they put all the time and effort and money into creating said work so people could enjoy it after compensating them for said time and effort and money invested. For times when said big disclaimer doesn't appear, it is because it isn't necessary, as said disclaimers are merely a statement of the copyright law of which everyone is aware.

The creator of such creative works often use the previously mentioned compensation to create more works for people to enjoy, or to make the current work more enjoyable for those who compensated them, which they again make with the general understanding that they will be again compensated. This is generally understood because of the generally understandable way in which it is generally conveyed, such as a big disclaimer.

Copyright law isn't just morally understandable, but additionally, practical in its function.

Edit: Clarified things to make them clearer, clearly.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Jan 24 2012, 12:07 pm by Azrael.Wrath.

A social contract is essentially that you agree to the norms of the society in which you live in order to be permitted to continue living there. These days the social contract is pretty much codified in law: breaking the social contract in an overt fashion will usually coincide with breaking the law of the land.

For example, part of our social contract is that when in public you will be fully clothed. If you don't abide by this, you will get funny looks and also outright hostility and name-calling from a lot of people (go look in the homosexuality thread where you see people talk about how they don't like gay pride parades because people walk around naked etc). You will also be breaking the law, but that is separate from the social contract. Another part of our social contract is the correct use of public facilities such as restrooms (hopefully I shouldn't need to outline what this entails). Another thing is to not go around screaming or shouting or making a public commotion. In other societies, these practices may be absent or different and again backed by laws or not.

Everyone understands that you are supposed to buy DVDs, not download them for free from the internet. You KNOW that is what is expected of you, so you can't claim innocence of this.

See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_contract

But hey, if you want to keep making yourself look ignorant, by all means continue to argue that there's nothing "wrong" or "illegal" about piracy.

http://www.dpreview.com/news/2012/01/25/Imitated_Image_Copyright_Case

;_;

I do find the notion of intellectual property to be dangerously close to thought control, and defining the information to be extremely ambiguous, at best. In the above case, a quite absurd outcome resulted.

But we can argue over the moral backgrounds for quite some time, and we should all recognize that it really has no clear answer, especially since morality has no clear answer. Taking the societal contract approach is probably the best one, but I think we should avoid from calling it stealing (it's copying) since stealing has a different definition, and attempts to expand it to cover copyright infringement is simply intellectually dishonest. I find that most politicians who call it stealing do so to appeal to the emotions of their constituents.

That said, from a societal contract point of view, should we engage in copyright enforcement? Or is it an aging idea that cannot keep up with our current technological development?

As we all should be aware, it's actually easier to watch a movie illegally than legally, and the number of sites that have adapted to this are limited (netflix, etc.). Some have taken the stance that copyright infringement is a customer service issue, and you merely need to provide better service to your customer. Others vehemently oppose the idea of the free internet, and would see it shut down to prevent the loss of their would-be profits.

But I feel as though copyrights are an aging idea for an enlightened time. The internet isn't going to get any easier to control and I don't think controlling the internet is the correct route. Maybe it's an unavoidable development in our evolution, and we must abandon the idea (as Sweden did) or perhaps recognize that understanding why people pirate things illegally is the first step to remedying the problem.

Just tried to download obscure music download on a file sharing website.

When I clicked download big ass banner of FBI shutting down megaupload

whoops

nevermind

guess torrent...

Ooooor you can just call it copying, and concede that theft has to involve one party losing something. Something other than being the only one who knows said pattern.

You can still make copying bad, you just don't get the easy emotional appeal that comes with "theft"

How about we call it "squizzle" so we can stop having stupid arguments about semantics.

The logical differences between stealing (which I will refer to as taking) and copying should be apparent.

Taking requires that the original object A be removed. Stealing is the wrongful taking of object A (de jure).

Copying requires that the original object A is used (and only if it is used) to create an object B, which has the same characteristics as object A. Copyright infringement is the wrongful copying of object A (de jure).

Oh no. Megashares (the site I use to illegally download all my TV shows and movies) has removed its search function. Now you can only get links from the uploaders themselves (who have always made a habit of pasting their links on sites like releaselog anyway).

The timing of this happening with all the recent SOPA/PIPA stuff is odd to me. I wonder if there is still some sort of pressure being put on fileshare companies even after this issue has supposedly been put to rest.

Is this happening to anyone else?

Guess you've been living under a rock for the last month then, haven't you?

All over the internet

Take farty's example: mp3 is 1.47 MB. png is 1.42 without decent compression.

yeah. quick recompression drops it down to 1.37 MB.

Where does Farty say how big either of the files are?

Also this simply doesn't make sense from a theoretical standpoint, unless the MP3 compression simply wasn't as "compressed" as possible. I think you'd see a similar drop in size if you put it into a .zip or .rar.