Piracy != theft


WizardStan

Mega GP Mania
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May 24, 2008
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Or so says the appeals court of the USA. In discussion with coworkers I also learned that the UK has a physical property clause for theft.


http://gizmodo.com/5901263


What does this mean? Probably nothing. The RIAA and MPAA extort people with threatening charges of copyright infringement, not theft. The prosecutors in this case made a mistake trying to charge Aleynikov with theft and espionage when they should have stuck with copyright infringement and contract violations. The RIAA and MPAA are not likely to make the same mistake, especially not now that it's been tested in court.


It does put me in a class action lawsuit kind of mind: the RIAA may not officially charge people with theft, but they do call people who download music and movies "thieves". Sounds like libel to me, but I'm no lawyer.
 
interesting, its like you need to be a bl00dy lawyer these days to know whats what.


As you say though, that mistake of terms wont be done again
 
Instead of theft, or copyright infringement, or piracy, I think the whole industry would benefit if we called it shenanigans.


You wouldn’t steal shenanigan a car


You wouldn’t steal shenanigan a handbag


You wouldn’t steal shenanigan a television


You wouldn’t steal shenanigan a movie


Downloading pirated shenaniganed films is shenanigans stealing,


stealing Shenanigans are against the law,


PIRACY SHENANIGANS. IT’S A CRIME!
 
Instead of theft, or copyright infringement, or piracy, I think the whole industry would benefit if we called it shenanigans.


You wouldn’t steal shenanigan a car


You wouldn’t steal shenanigan a handbag


You wouldn’t steal shenanigan a television


You wouldn’t steal shenanigan a movie


Downloading pirated shenaniganed films is shenanigans stealing,


stealing Shenanigans are against the law,


PIRACY SHENANIGANS. IT’S A CRIME!

I really hate the original advert - for the simple fact that only legitimate users, who paid for/rented the item in question, are subjected to it. Pirates just cut out the copyright warning.
 
TL;DR- realized after I typed my rant that is was completely O/T.. but it's comments about piracy and theft in general...


in all honesty... it's about half and half for me. Shun if you will, but me and my friends talk about this all the time.


Of all the software that I own or have tried, I've legitimately paid for about half of it.


There are some bullet points from some of those conversations, these coming from several people with 20+ years experience pirating apps.


-If ease of getting the software wasn't illegitimately there I think I would end up paying for more software.. bittorrent being the single most popular channel due to ease of use


-Test driving a car is worse than pirating software because it is at no cost to the seller other than lost potential earnings if you don't purchase the software after trying it. Test driving a car is depreciating the value of the vehicle. If you don't purchase that car you test drove, you're worse than a pirate.


-I have paid for tons of software that wasn't worth anywhere near the price they are charging for it, I justify my actions as total money in / software out of the industry from my wallet.


-There is software I went out and bought after pirating it to not only have a legit copy, but to support the developers of a fine piece of work.


-best software solution to fighting piracy is to have an online mode/content in your software with unique registration keys and frequent updates that check for exploits and deny access. (ban hammer)


-md5 hash check your launch client, dependencies, and content libraries at different points during the game/application not just at loading, also embed it into the coding of the application's content, most games are cracked with a simple application launcher switch-a-roo or replacing a small library.. usually it's one of the smallest files in the installation... make your content files monolithic and enormous and put your legitimacy checker in that file... make it a real pain in the ass to crack or have someone download a crack for.


-people are going to break the single player/offline version of your content, accept it, but don't make it easy, it's unavoidable unless your software is too niche, most of those people that are content with just the offline version probably weren't going to buy it anyway, but if they want to play online or get updates that most users will want they will stay legit. (diablo 2 approach) not perfect, but it would work.


-constant online connection or over the top piracy prevention methods will scare off more customers than you are trying to retain by doing either


-make your software reasonably priced, if something costs under $20 it would actually sell more copies, would venture to say you would actually sell 3x more copies of your software than if you released it for $60... I have impulsed purchased tons of software that was in the $10-$20 range... I would not have impulse purchased a $60 software, I would get a pirated version first and see if it was any good.


that's all I got
 
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I really hate the original advert - for the simple fact that only legitimate users, who paid for/rented the item in question, are subjected to it. Pirates just cut out the copyright warning.
The one constant rule of piracy seems to be that no matter what kind of protection you implement in your product, those that pirate it will not see it nor have to deal with it. This doesn't make copyright protections completely useless as it somewhat combats casual copying, but anyone who puts a little bit of effort into it can easily get his/her hands on scene releases..
 
FACT. The Federation Against Copyright Theft is basically based upon a lie. Thus I can't even begin to take them seriously.


Add to this the fact that you only see their anti-piracy ads if you PAY MONEY to sit in a cinema or buy a DVD and the whole thing is very, very wrong.


Honestly, for people like me who are very much on the fence, it makes me want to pirate things, just to spite these corporate douchebags.


Furthermore, these content creators are still entrenched in a stubborn refusal to make their content available via awesome services like Netflix.


Netflix, when it works, is fucking amazing, and every studio under the sun should be begging them to host their films the minute they stop showing in the cinema.


Unfortunately, the film industry has blown up into a silly encumbered giant, with stupid budgets, and stupidly overpaid hack actors, not to mention a lot of greed along the way. It's going to take a long time to change.


Still, their refusal to be progressive and supply streaming services with decent content ( It's really not Lovefilm or Netflix's fault that their lineups are shit ) makes Piracy pretty much the only way to get content the way most of us want to get content.


DVDs and Blu-Rays are overpriced. The cost of an HD rental on iTunes is nearly as much as a monthly Netflix subscription, and the cost to buy films on iTunes is patently absurd. Ugh.


Things like Spotify have made streaming a vast majority of music ( even some fairly obscure and indie stuff ) for the most part much, much easier than downloading it. Kudos to them.


I'd double, or even triple the monthly fee I pay to Netflix to get every single new movie release available to stream the moment it leaves the cinema. Don't even get me started on how shitty Cinemas are.
 
Add to this the fact that you only see their anti-piracy ads if you PAY MONEY to sit in a cinema or buy a DVD and the whole thing is very, very wrong.
It's not just the insulting ads, either - if you're a legitimate, paying customer, you're also subjected to various methods that prevent you from watching what you've bought and paid for on your own terms.


This is what put an end to me buying most DVDs at all (I only tend to occasionally pick up retro TV series box-sets, which invariably were made on too low a budget to bother with anti-customer measures - or even region-coding, in some cases, which is always a nice pro-customer measure implemented by some of these outfits who know that their sets may not get a global release due to their low budget and publishers not wanting to take a risk on them), and since I wouldn't dream of pirating their products, I'm quite happy to go without. On the very rare occasions where there is a release that I would like, I wait until someone is selling it used for pennies on Amazon, because it is far less risky to spend 1p + £2.75 postage only to find out that I can't rip it for viewing on my Pandora, than it is to spend £5 to £10 for the same outcome. Quite simply, these measures have lost them my business.


I'm quite sure that a lot of people are the same way, but may not tend to mention it (or be part of a community where it might come up in conversation), so how many lost customers are there, I wonder?


As an aside, also relating to this topic, but with regard to video games, I seem to recall that a couple of years ago, Ubisoft released a Prince of Persia game for Microsoft Windows, without DRM. They then remained very quiet about the fact that they got more sales seemingly due to the lack of these anti-customer measures. It's a real shame, because they should have been very proud of that fact and yelled about it as much as they can, since legitimate customers have been objecting to this stuff for years, and it proved that trusting your customers has rewards.
 
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Being a supporter of free software and freedom in general, I think DRM is appalling, but even worse is laws like the DMCA that make it illegal to circumvent them. Honestly, the DMCA has to be one of the worst (though probably not the worst) things that happened to U.S. law in the past couple of decades.
 
Seen this picture floating around recently.. not trying to get political.. but hey there is a piggy!


piracy-not-theft-460x328.jpg
 
Well, yes, it's obvious to tech type people the difference between theft and piracy. This is important because it's the first time the courts have officially recognized the difference.
 
Ok, not the first time then, just the first time in sufficiently recent memory that people might actually do something with it. :p
 
Sorry to be pedantic, but:


Copyright infringement is not theft, but piracy is robbery committed at sea, often with violence etc


Whichever idiot first decided to call copyright infringement 'piracy' should be keelhauled; yarrr!


---


there is also a good reason to keep a few CDROM drives - some evil publishers design their CDs to confuse DVD/CD drives in computers - dedicated CD drives will read them perfectly because they just assume its a CD without checking first - why do they have an objection to me playing my CD in my computer?
 
The use of the word "piracy" to refer to copyright infringement really is pretty silly absolutely absurd propaganda, but to be honest, it seems disingenuous (or, at least, hyper-correct) to claim it isn't a valid meaning of the word at this point. It's a really common term in that context now.


EDIT: Still, this term should be opposed.
 
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FACT. The Federation Against Copyright Theft is basically based upon a lie. Thus I can't even begin to take them seriously.

Remember their predecessors, 'FAST'? (The S being 'software').


They were always trying to instill the fear of dawn raids by Gorilla Stormtroopers on the average ST/Amiga owner who had a suspicious box of floppies.


However, their founder members included Ocean (not the only guilty party) - who spent the early part of their rise to 8 bit success selling unlicensed clones of Arcade games - as did countless other famous software houses. They didn't even change the names much, blatant full page ads and all. Brazen copyright infringement - maybe that's why 'piracy' is the tag they and FACT seem to prefer, because to describe it more accurately might highlight that their members have not been averse to 'borrowing' others 'intellectual property' quite often themselves.
 
I'm only semi serious here but 'Piracy' may well be the correct 'legal' term, even if no violence occured. We may well be already 'at sea' upon the land, or at least according to a certain school of folk who have tried to laid bare the legal systems of various countries.


In Canada, the US, the UK and from the UK by extension, to all Common Law countries, there is a group of folk rightly or wrongly (possibly largely the latter), trying to prove that the 'current' legal system, aimed largely at boistering the coffers of the 'banks' with fiat 'currency', via fining people 'registered' at 'birth' in the 'dock' of the courts, rather than actually delivering any justice, is all based upon the laws of the sea and not the land.


The Common Law derived from travelling circuit judges, deciding to have a uniformity of like punishment for like crimes, appears to be sitting upon an older system of law, if these people are correct. One which draws its terminology ('legalese' and you are correct that you need a lawyer to even attempt to interpret it, which is an interesting point as to, exactly who's society, societies rules should apply), from Roman and earlier 'Maritime Admiralty Law'.


Under that Law :


You are a vessel. Birthed at a harbour. Birthing must be registered, which is an act of transference of the contents of a vessel as Maritime Salvage, to the Harbour Master, to be his chattel property.


The Magna Carta of 1215 was an arrangement made upon the water, between disgruntled land owning Barons and the King, who was rowed out unto the Thames River to sign or die, a document to enshrine certain rights to the People of England.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/c6EFiZJfZvw?feature=oembed

But was it the People, or just the Barons?


People are only mentioned as chattel of the Barons, who were the few to have any power outside the Monarchy.


SO do the people have rights, or are we just chattel slaves?


Try and Pass a Port without one and you'll quickly find yourself a real prisoner. Yet if you cant leave a free country (UK) to enter the land of the free (US) without all the proper paperwork 'submitted' (legalese definition akin to 'begging, subservient, dominated' etc) then are you really free?


Except to "Go Shopping"?


Therefore the act of Theft, which under common law of the land, would entail 'the loss of property' by another and not the re-creation of, (which is the Piracy we are talking about), under Maritime Law, would indeed be taking place upon the High Seas. Yarrghhh!!!


It would be one registered vessel, taking without permission of the harbour master, another registered vessels, registered property (intellectual or otherwise, which in and of itself has also become 'under the owner'ship'' of a third party to whom it was registered as trademark in the first place).


Under the 1688 Declaration and 1689 Bill of Rights (still in force upon the statute books) of the UK (the inspiration for America's Independence 1776 and Bill of Rights 1789-91) a whole host of modern laws are infact in breach of it and should be chucked out, or even that their breachers, should be chucked in jail.


For example, Jack Straw had to admit/point out, that the plans to make a (*cough**new**cough*) Bill of Rights for the UK (in light of Immigration and largely 'Synthetic Terrorism' by comic book villians, or worse still Four Lions like 'Simply Pathetic Terrorism' that doesn't even warrant a George Carlin 'Dangerous Fun' Award) were infact, despite ALL the newspaper, tv, political tennis debate time, F'IN MUTE!!


AS NO UK POLITICIAN IS ALLOWED TO ALTER THE BILL OF RIGHTS.


THEY SWEAR OATHS TO UPHOLD IT.


AS DID THE QUEEN.


BUT we all know how that turned out.


Happy Jubillee Year


oooh SILLY OLYMPICS too ....


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmyz_f8Sx14
 
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