61–70 of 191 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The whole system makes eminent sense. Content that has been permitted by the owner is released in your country, when the owner permits. If you are resort to piracy because of this, you are still stealing.
You are not stealing, you are making illegal copies.
There is no need to rationalize why you use Bittorrent, there is no argument to win and nothing to defend. It's not stealing, it's not not stealing it's just a fact that people will continue to use bittorrents as long as there is too much friction to get it legally. Bittorrent will be around as long as the content owners insist on localizing copyright and not offering their content to a globally oriented customer bas…
You can use bittorrent to download and watch a film that's been released on DVD. This deprives the content created of a sale/hire/watch on demand, so in theory they lose out on revenue.
You can also use bittorrent to download and watch a TV show that was broadcast in another country the night before and that will never be shown on your country's TV network. Think about NBC or Comedy Central - 30 Rock and Colbert aren't going to be broadcast in the UK any time soon, and their content owners refuse to let international users watch online. Torrenting this content is therefore a victimless crime.
As an English speaker in Germany I was particularly interested in using things like iTunes (which is available here) to access TV. What do you know, it is exclusively German language content. And it is also only released when it airs in Germany rather than when it first airs in the US or the UK. Where is the logic there? If I wanted to get German language TV when it airs on TV, I would just watch TV. The whole system…
The whole system makes eminent sense. Content that has been permitted by the owner is released in your country, when the owner permits. If you are resort to piracy because of this, you are still stealing.
There is no legal means for someone to restrict where and when I can and cannot choose to view or use content I own, as much as they would love to think so. And they indeed love to think so: I've actually seen companies claim that it is illegal to use the software they sell outside of the country they sell it in.
If a movie by company X is released in country A but not country B, company X cannot prevent me from watching their movie in country B. I may have to go out of my way to import a copy, but there is nothing illegal about doing so (at least not under the laws of typical Western countries).
If this wasn't true, it would basically be illegal to take any sort of media-carrying device (laptop, iPod, etc) outside of the country where you bought the relevant media.
As an English speaker in Germany I was particularly interested in using things like iTunes (which is available here) to access TV. What do you know, it is exclusively German language content. And it is also only released when it airs in Germany rather than when it first airs in the US or the UK. Where is the logic there? If I wanted to get German language TV when it airs on TV, I would just watch TV. The whole system…
The whole system makes eminent sense. Content that has been permitted by the owner is released in your country, when the owner permits. If you are resort to piracy because of this, you are still stealing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Germany is usually even more behind, and TV broadcasts and movies are horribly dubbed versions. I'd gladly pay three to five times as much for Netflix as it costs in the US if it were available...
If you're willing to pay that much, sounds like you just need to grab a $20/month server in the US and use it as a VPN endpoint, then use whatever services in the US that you like.
Same goes for Holland, this, and TV is very unreliable and a year behind the USA. Plus movies are usually released a few months after the USA.
I believe this is another example of where piracy was a force for good (for the consumer) Another example is how many nonDRMed music is more easily purchasable, and many TV stations (eg BBC) have online 'watch yesterday's show' services.
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Clearly there is a point to rehashing the argument as long as you're pointing to a wikipedia page on theft of services and claiming that bitorrenting a copy of a TV show is the same thing. Clearly they're not. Hacking a cable box to access channels without paying for them might be, but if you're completely routing around their service, in part because they don't actually provide what you want (e.g. a show in your lan…
if you're completely routing around their service, in part because they don't actually provide what you want (e.g. a show in your language), then you're clearly not stealing it. Huh? That's a completely specious claim. The owner of the rights to the TV show may not be offering the product in your market-- yet . The may choose to do so at some point in the future. Whether they do or not, it has no bearing on the fact…
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Which is a form of theft (cf http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theft_of_services ). There's no point in rehashing the semantic argument; it's still theft in the eyes of the law, and while renaming it may help assuage your conscience, it doesn't really add much to the argument.
The law was written way before there was possible to make an exact copy of something while leaving the original intact and way before the cost of such act is so close to zero than even those who have no money to buy original still are able to make the copy. One can apply the same laws, but doing so is stretching them too much. Consider the possibility of you making exact copy of a car just by pressing a button on som…
b) they still got all the money for the cars
they produced, there is not a single missing
In such an event the car maker won't be able to recuperate its sunk costs, and the writing would be clearly on the wall, so such a magical car will never be produced, unless there's legislation in place that prevents people from giving away free cars.
In software or creative endeavorers, where the sunk cost is mostly measured in time spent on the task, there are always people willing to give away their work for free (having other incentives than money). Internet also makes it easier to find other people with the same interests and collaborate.
But make no mistake about it - hobbyists will never be able to create something like an Audi, or an Avatar or an Adobe Photoshop for that matter (yes, I'm a happy GIMP user, it ain't and never will be on the same level as Photoshop).
I buy the DVD on amazon.com, but while it's
shipping I torrent the same movie and watch it.
Is it still a theft?
Imagine you're Da Vinci, and I'm displaying a copy of Gioconda in my museum, half the size, with the hue changed, with less details and cropped, saying to people that that's just like the original Gioconda ... after all the hard work you've put, I'd imagine you'd get upset too.
On the other hand it isn't right for people to get charged multiple times for the same movie. So I guess piracy itself is as morally-wrong as these ripoffs.
If I torrent something "getting for free"
is never the reason to do that.
Personally I'm sick of bad movies that lured me to see them because of a fancy trailer that exhibited non-representative traits of the movie.
Also for software, 30 days valuation periods are not enough for complex software like Office or Photoshop. Also, software like Photoshop Elements should be free of charge, or you should get some sort of refund when buying Photoshop.
This is the real problem IMHO - ripoffs.