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[LegoLord]

Copyright laws and crap don't make piracy harder.
They make getting stuff the legit way harder.
This actually encourages piracy.

Exactly.  They need to work out a method of making it harder to pirate rather than the other way around.

[Aqizzar]

Copyright laws and crap don't make piracy harder.
They make getting stuff the legit way harder.
This actually encourages piracy.

Exactly.  They need to work out a method of making it harder to pirate rather than the other way around.

I was going to quip that this is rather thoughtless.  If increased copy protection and legislation encourages piracy, then what would reduce it, digital anarchy?

But then I had a realization.  The only reason that piracy wasn't a gigantic problem before 1999 or so was that the Internet as we know it didn't exist to facilitate mass, effortless file distribution.  When the development of bandwidth and software infrastructure was enough to carry the only slightly increased size of games and marginally reduced size of media files, piracy took off.

I have benefited from this considerably.  Earlier tonight, I was considering pirating Medieval 2: Total War.  Along with it's expansion, it comes close to nine gigabytes.  Empire: Total War is nearly thirteen.

Piracy has been prevalent and easy because the time, effort, and risk of pirating games (negligible) was so much less than my perception of the listed price.  But the exploding size of in-game media, made possible by exploding hard drive and DVD capacity, has outstripped the Internet's ability to transfer that much data in a timeframe I consider reasonable.  Thanks to the notorious unreliability of torrenters, I figured a thirteen gigabyte ISO would take longer to download than mailing a disk.  Combined with my real job that pays real money, I decided it was much more in my interest to just buy the damn game with a dedicated disk, instead of the wait of downloading and buying DVDs to burn it on.

So that's what stopped my piracy.  Uneven advancement of technology and a non-teenager income.

[Okenido]

That actually depends quite a bit.

How much did you pay for shipping?
How many people where seeding?

[Tahin]

See, that's what needs to happen for piracy to cease being a threat: Companies need to start releasing games on Blueray and such. Most people would think twice about downloading and storing a 50 gb game if they have < 500 gb hard drive and it will take half a week to download.

That said, the sharing of music and such illegally has been going on as long as recordings have been copyrightable. With the advent of the internet, it's gotten a lot easier, but it's not nearly as much of an issue as some make it out to be. The main issue is that we have all these damn teenagers who don't seem to get the concept that if you like an artist, go out and buy the damn CD to support them!

Now, in regard to the actual topic at hand: awesome.

[Areyar]

Though the increased bandwith of the net does facillitate undiscriminate, mass-pirating by teenagers, piracy was already widespread even before telnet(?).
C64 games were hacked left and right and even the consoles of the day were pirated.
PC piracy was a bit less maybe, but only due to virusses being transferred through sharing floppies.
virusses back then were just malicious, without any benefit to a hacker, just vandalism.

Conspiracy theories exist about software companies creating virusses on purpose to combat copying. 

Though I wouldn't believe it about legit bussinesses without solid proof, some semilegit corps promoting semi-spyware spyware scanners are quite suspect in my view.

[florian]

That said, the sharing of music and such illegally has been going on as long as recordings have been copyrightable. With the advent of the internet, it's gotten a lot easier, but it's not nearly as much of an issue as some make it out to be. The main issue is that we have all these damn teenagers who don't seem to get the concept that if you like an artist, go out and buy the damn CD to support them!

I would buy CDs if that would actually help the artists. See: http://wizbangblog.com/content/2004/10/14/does-a-cd-have.php. $1.60 for the artist? Yeah, sounds like a fair thing.

To that guy who works for the music industry: Do you add any value? If not, why do I have to pay for you?

And finally, if your business model involves selling to teenagers, you automatically lose. Teenagers have lots of free time and no money. They will always find ways to pirate your software/music/...

[Aqizzar]

I would buy CDs if that would actually help the artists. See: http://wizbangblog.com/content/2004/10/14/does-a-cd-have.php. $1.60 for the artist? Yeah, sounds like a fair thing.

$1.60 a fan is a lot better than than $0.00 a fan.

[LegoLord]

That said, the sharing of music and such illegally has been going on as long as recordings have been copyrightable. With the advent of the internet, it's gotten a lot easier, but it's not nearly as much of an issue as some make it out to be. The main issue is that we have all these damn teenagers who don't seem to get the concept that if you like an artist, go out and buy the damn CD to support them!

I would buy CDs if that would actually help the artists. See: http://wizbangblog.com/content/2004/10/14/does-a-cd-have.php. $1.60 for the artist? Yeah, sounds like a fair thing.

To that guy who works for the music industry: Do you add any value? If not, why do I have to pay for you?

And finally, if your business model involves selling to teenagers, you automatically lose. Teenagers have lots of free time and no money. They will always find ways to pirate your software/music/...

If everyone bought music, $1.60 would make a big difference, actually.  Amazingly enough, they still make a profit from music, even with the pirating!  It's just crap compared to what it'd be if people payed for their music.

To the guy for the industry; if he wasn't there, you wouldn't even get any music.  Besides, more money flow=better economy=better times for everyone.

Finally, teenagers have jobs and nothing more than gas that they actually need to spend it on, and most of the jobs they have pay more than well enough for that.  It's not as good as it would be if they were adults, but they don't exactly need to spend on all of the same things as adults.  In short, they're gonna have more spending money.  A lot of people say from experience that they had more spending money when they were in high school (including the guy from the bank who got me signed up for an atm card).

[Jreengus]

Sooooooo..... in attempt to draw the thread away from the inevitable tantrum spiral that piracy discussion will throw it into what do people think of the pirate party's other political aims. The removal of medical patenting and the increase in respect for peoples right to privacy. (Scroll down to the bottom.)

[LegoLord]

Removing medical patenting?  Now that sounds interesting, and might actually be able to do some good.  It might remove incentive to develop from the companies, though; perhaps simply restricting what could be copyrighted.  For example, not allowing them to only making some minute change to a medicine and being able to get a new patent on it.  However I can see such regulation being difficult.

[florian]

Removing medical patenting is important – it would make critical drugs, e.g. Anti-HIV drugs, cheaper and make them more affordable for patients in Africa.

To the guy for the industry; if he wasn't there, you wouldn't even get any music.  Besides, more money flow=better economy=better times for everyone.

Wait. If you weren't there, I could still download music. You're not adding any value, you're just supporting an obsolete distribution channel.

[LegoLord]

"Oops, a I dropped my I-pod in the sink and my computer just crashed/got fried/whatever.  Too bad I downloaded instead of buying CD's"
I think some people trust a solid copy more than an electrical one and would prefer that CDs still be available.

Second, if everyone was downloading for free, where would a musician get his income?  The incentive to be a professional musician would be gone, and we'd be left with a lot of crap music and very little good stuff, just like TV when all the good writers went on strike for not getting royalties from online viewing of their shows.

[umiman]

Removing medical patenting is important – it would make critical drugs, e.g. Anti-HIV drugs, cheaper and make them more affordable for patients in Africa.

It would also remove any incentive for people to fund the research required to develop such drugs. There can't be many people in this world willing to spend billions upon billions of dollars to develop something that someone else will just steal the moment they finish it.

[LegoLord]

I think the problem with the Pirate party here is unwillingness to compromise.

[Jreengus]

Removing medical patenting is important – it would make critical drugs, e.g. Anti-HIV drugs, cheaper and make them more affordable for patients in Africa.

It would also remove any incentive for people to fund the research required to develop such drugs. There can't be many people in this world willing to spend billions upon billions of dollars to develop something that someone else will just steal the moment they finish it.

So apparently no-one read the link....

The idea isn't to force drugs company's to hand out drugs for free but rather to abolish private drug research altogether.

"Today it is already the public sector (henceforth called "the government") that pays for the bulk of all drugs that are used in Europe, thanks to various systems for universal medical coverage. (See for example page 37 in this report from EFPIA, The European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations.) It is the government that pays for the pharmaceutical research today, by paying high prices to the pharmaceutical companies for patented drugs."

So essentially the idea is to cut out the middle man and have all EU countries pool a portion of their money into medical research and drug development they estimate for about 50% of the cost you could increase the actually amount of money going toward drug research and that you could ensure the drugs being researched are the drugs that are needed rather than the ones most likely to make money.

Edit for clarification:
That's 50% of the money government's are already paying for drugs, 20% of that would be going toward drug research and 30% toward production and distribution.