Megaupload, SHUT DOWN!

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Asp-Z
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23 Jan 2012, 2:16 pm

They'll end all the filesharing on the same day they end all the wars and create infinite world peace. Some say frozen pigs will fly out of hell on this day, too.

Beauty_pact
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25 Jan 2012, 12:30 pm

Comment on this from the Swedish Pirate Party/Piratpartiet:

www.piratpartiet.se/nyheter/swedish-pir ... megaupload

Quote:

The hosting site MegaUpload was raided by police today, on orders by US federal authorities. MegaUpload’s owner, New Zealand based Kim ”Dotcom” Scmitz, and three associates were also arrested. The Swedish Pirate Party strongly condemns this action.

- MegaUpload was well-known to act in accordance with the law, says Anna Troberg, the Pirate Party’s leader, but was still a thorn in the side of American business interests.

- The service was based in New Zealand, Troberg goes on. That makes the issue even more problematic. Someone should explain to both the copyright industry and the New Zealand justice system that United States law does not apply to the rest of the world.

The timing of the raid is politically conspicuous since it comes the day after the largest protest against abuse of power in the history of the Internet, a protest against the net censorship bill SOPA. The Internet is currently in an uproar. Troberg foresees that the political consequences will escalate switfly.

- MegaUpload had 150 million members, says Troberg. That means they also have 150 million voters. This will give the Pirate Party and our international sisterparties a lot of traction.

This raid has many similarities with the raid against The Pirate Bay on May 31, 2006. There, too, it became apparent that American business interests were behind the raid, and there too were there major political ramifications. Among other things, it led to the Swedish Pirate Party gaining 7,1% of the votes in the European Parliamentary elections of 2009.

- This demonstrates with all desirable clarity that the copyright industry is a real threat against democratic societies. They will stop at nothing in their struggle against entering the future.

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Beauty_pact
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25 Jan 2012, 12:49 pm

visagrunt wrote:

I am not going to shed any tears for the person who has downloaded thousands of dollars of free material that they ought properly to have purchased through legitimate sources. A portion of every dollar that I have spent paying for material goes to subsidize the freeloaders who want it all, but are unwilling or unable to pay for it.

That may be that you do not, but I have gotten into several interests, such as a deepened interest in anime, through downloads such as what you speak of, and now have a larger anime collection than most who are really into it - a collection which I have paid for. So that still makes it a problem, I suppose? Furthermore, do you find it equally horrid that people who are too poor to buy the material, instead download it? Would your suggestion be that poor people are left out, not learning and experiencing new things that those with sufficient funds take for granted (people like you, maybe)?

By the way, for those unaware, SOPA/PIPA continues in the form of an update to the law 'HR 1981 "Protecting Children from Internet Pornographers"' (www.examiner.com/civil-rights-in-wilmington/hr-1981-protecting-children-from-internet-pornographers-sounds-good-right). Not to mention SOPA/PIPA's big brother law ACTA, that is just about to be passed (see my signature).

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Last edited by Beauty_pact on 25 Jan 2012, 12:58 pm, edited 2 times in total.

Asp-Z
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25 Jan 2012, 12:52 pm

Beauty_pact wrote:

By the way, for those unaware, SOPA/PIPA continues in the form of an update to the law 'HR 1981 "Protecting Children from Internet Pornographers"' (www.examiner.com/civil-rights-in-wilmin ... good-right). Not to mention SOPA/PIPA's big brother law ACTA, that is just about to be passed (see my signature).

Classic, that. "We can't pass our crappy law so we'll add it onto something with 'children' in the title and hope no one notices" :roll:

As for ACTA, there's some online activity going on against it, and Europe is (hopefully) smart enough to not pass it. Hopefully.

visagrunt
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25 Jan 2012, 1:07 pm

Beauty_pact wrote:

The ends do not justify the means.

To my way of thinking, means should be found whereby people like me, who can afford to pay for the art that we consume, will contribute to ensuring that art is made available to those who cannot. But a free-for-all in which anyone--regardless of their ability to pay--is free to steal whatever they like with no regard for fair compensation to the artist is unworkable. Why should anyone, anywhere pay for a single movie, television show or song if they are all avaialble, free at the point of delivery, with a few clicks of a mouse? For the time being, I am paying for quality (my purchases are mostly film and television products), but the increasing availability of HD products on torrent sites is quickly eroding that quality gap. When technology overtakes that gap, why will I bother?

Quote:

How often do I have to say it before people will actually read my words: SOPA and PIPA are bad law. The same applies to other legislative proposals that seek to establish the same tools. The industry is fooling itself if it believes that legislative initiatives like this will succeed.

Time and again I have said that neither these schemes, nor a legislative vacuum are acceptable solutions. There must be a reconciling of interests between artists' interests in being compensated for their work and individuals interests in free expression and sharing of information.

It is only a fool who supposes that if a law is bad, then the absence of that law is, ipso facto, good.

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Oodain
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25 Jan 2012, 2:16 pm

visagrunt wrote:

Beauty_pact wrote:

Quote:

but that whole argument hinges on that they wouldnt get fair compensation in such a system and the present day tells us that manyy artists stand to gain a much greater compensation than they did under old copyright law, several international bands actually publish all but their hidden pieces on youtube and still receive more than enough to be called rich.

as you say the end doesnt justify the means but that holds true for legislation as well.

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visagrunt
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25 Jan 2012, 3:38 pm

Oodain wrote:

Ah, the Justin Bieber argument rears its head again.

You have anecdotal evidence that a select number of artists have profited from a system in which their marketing efforts have borne fruit. But if every artist pursued the same approach, would that still hold true?

You cannot justify a business model on the basis of outliers.

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Oodain
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25 Jan 2012, 3:54 pm

no, i have firsthand experience from about a dozen different artists that all use this format, i do for all but my contracted pictures, the constituents are used in several photos.

i know of at least 3 bands, one of them i basically grew up with, they decided that record companies bring nothing but trouble and yet they can live off of being local musicians basically,
now while they might not make millions a year they make a lot more than others at a similar level in their career, most comes from concerts,(something even proffesional musicians basically all say)

then there are bands as soley, they are a part of a record label (local one, but hey), yet they still publish their music online, it is their main source of PR, it allows for easy word of mouth, a cd does not.

then you have all the people that started their bands with itunes as a platform, they are somewhat of a hybrid, many of these bands also benefit greatly from the above, again they receive more pr. download than what they should expect through a normal record label, yet with virtually no downside in the world of today.

so yes you can call it anecdotal but you can also call the reported losses of most of these large copyright holders anecdotal, or in the very least based on the false assumption that a dowload could have been a purchase.

again the whole concept of intellectual property as we know it goes against everything that helps move us forwards as a species,

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blauSamstag
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25 Jan 2012, 11:26 pm

visagrunt wrote:

That would be true if we were talking about sandwiches but we are not talking about sandwiches.

A missed sale is not lost money. It's money that never existed.

visagrunt
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26 Jan 2012, 12:09 pm

blauSamstag wrote:

That would be true if we were talking about sandwiches but we are not talking about sandwiches.

A missed sale is not lost money. It's money that never existed.

Tell that to someone whose business model is based on the sale of services. 70% of Americans and Canadians work in the services sector. You cannot blithely pretend that the economics of manufacturing durable and consumable goods applies uncritically to the economics of selling services.

A copyright license is more akin to a shoe-shine than it is to a shoe.

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Asp-Z
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26 Jan 2012, 12:17 pm

visagrunt wrote:

blauSamstag wrote:

That would be true if we were talking about sandwiches but we are not talking about sandwiches.

A missed sale is not lost money. It's money that never existed.

They need to keep up with current market trends or be left to go out of business just like any other company would. If I was in the smartphone market and used the same OS I did in the 90's, I'd expect to go out of business way before 2012. Similarly, if you're honking movies and music and you fight to keep your old business model standing, despite it being obsolete, you can expect to go out of business too. And rightly so.

visagrunt
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26 Jan 2012, 4:01 pm

Asp-Z wrote:

There is a difference between a service business going under because of shrinking demand for its service and a business going under because consumers decide to acquire the product for free rather than paying a fair price for it.

The current business model may well be broken--but that does not justify an argument that it should be free at the point of delivery.

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Asp-Z
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26 Jan 2012, 4:21 pm

visagrunt wrote:

Asp-Z wrote:

There's a reducing demand if people want to use streaming sites to watch films instead of paying £10 to get it from iTunes, which is why Netflix has started and, in the US, takes up the exact same percentage of internet traffic as BitTorrent does in Europe. Similarly, Spotify is gaining popularity because it allows people to stream music for free (with ads and limits) or for a small subscription fee, and that started in Europe first with great success.

Point is, the entertainment industry has only just started catching up with the latest trends, and it's now getting a lot of profit - don't listen to their propaganda, their profit increases every single year - but TBH I still think that eventually, independents will kill the majors. The process has already begun, because technology has made the massive middlemen that are record companies and publishers obsolete, and, in time, as technology progresses, the same will happen with big film and TV studios.

visagrunt
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26 Jan 2012, 5:40 pm

Asp-Z wrote:

I don't disagree with you--the future of the industy lies in harnessing the internet. But that's not the position that posters like blauSamstag, Oodain and Beauty_pact were propounding.

Why is it that so few people are willing to look for the middle ground?

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Asp-Z
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26 Jan 2012, 5:42 pm

Fact is this - if people are downloading lots of stuff for free, yet they were previously willing to pay for this stuff, market failure has occurred, so it's up to the market to sort it out. We shouldn't have the government stepping in to protect massive monopolies. That's just corruption.

Oodain
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26 Jan 2012, 7:19 pm

visagrunt wrote:

Asp-Z wrote:

based on what excactly??

do you even know what my stance is beyond "not the same as yours"?

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