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primesuspect
The Curator of Delightful Experiences Admin, D&D Supernerd, Supporter, Expo Attendee
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First, even though they are slapping jail sentences and large fines on 3 people pirate bay continues as strong as ever. If they managed to shutdown pirate bay, well so what, on to the next torrent site. Shut down enough torrent sites and one of the other current p2p alternatives using encrypted clouds becomes the dominant method.
The only way to stop massive file sharing is to kill the bandwidth at the ISP levels and that effectively kills the internet.
[ rant ]
Over the last few days I've heard the usual - "Huge corporations screwing people with high prices / artists getting shafted / only pirate to try out before I buy / not available for months where I am etc etc" excuses over and over again. If people really believed all those, then they would boycott the product, and only consume content directly from artists - compensating them appropriately. However that will never happen. People have this incredible entitlement mentality that overrides all their fancy excuses. They don't want it cheaper / easier - they want it free, and now.
People also mention the examples of Radiohead / Nine inch Nails and their recent experiments with distribution. Both were incredibly successful, and they are pointed to as some sort of new ideal (although many managed to bitch that Radioheads files were "too low quality"). I fully support these endeavors, but I think both bands are being a little disingenuous. They would simply not have had the same success, had they not had years of backing from the "evil corporations" that they are now railing against. The fact is that most people do not have the resources to put together albums like that, and even if they did - they would not have the years of promotion and distribution that would be necessary for similar success.
I produce content. I write software, I make art, and I believe that my work has some value. If I publish a something, and someone makes a copy without compensating me, then they have stolen from me. I know that many don't believe that copyright infringement is stealing, and will point to the fact that nothing physical has been lost, but they are wrong. I spend time, money and effort on my work, and if people think that it isn't worth my asking price, then they should do without. They are not entitled to it, whatever rationalization they may choose to offer.
I'd like to add as a final thought, that I believe that equating piracy with file sharing is being dishonest in its own right. There is a growing contingent trying to link the two, and thus try to argue that the prosecution and attempted shutting down of sites like TPB is some sort of attack on distribution models, rather than an attack on piracy. There is also the now popular "google argument". (You know - because google was created with the the same goals, hosts torrent files, and openly mocks requests for removal of copyrighted content). File sharing is an important part of a connected culture, but we shouldn't pretend that we live in some utopian world where the vast majority of the massive amounts of bandwith consumed by protocols such as bittorrent are being used to spread the latest ubuntu release, it simply isn't true.
[ /rant ]
I get mocked quite a bit for my "anti-piracy" leanings, but the above is a large part of why I don't do it.
If you want to stop piracy you'll have to hurt the people doing the pirating where it hurts most. Their internet pipe. Trying to kill the source in this particular case is pointless since the source is so far distanced now from being a specific source. The source of internet piracy is just that the Internet. You could try and curb habbits and educate people but lets be realistic, the chances of that happening are minute. Any more then putting out a public service annoucement on stopping any kind of crime.
So while I do understand your rant, I think everyone understands your rant. It's idealistic thinking. You can't stop crime by clicking your heals and whishing three times. If you are serious about stopping piracy you have to find a way to more effectively punish the people doing the pirating. Which means throttling, caps or per use internet charges like any other utility. If mom suddenly sees a $300 internet bill juniors going to get the beats.
A budding developer could offer his software for free download with a trial certificate that is an actual certificate file with a generated hash. The program could terminate without the presence of a certificate generated by the developer and only work for one copy per single pc (or whatever). Autodesk Maya uses a similar method but it's flawed and easily pirated via a program that generates the needed file. Verisign could help on that front.
Cracking a program on your own can be done with memory hooking/dumping apps(to strip packers), hex editors, and rebuilders. The info on how to do it and the tools are easily found online, not that I've ever done anything like that :range:
Basically copyright theft is nothing new it's always been around, it's always been a problem. The difference is that it's so much more common and easier now and the quality of the copies has dramatically increased.
Essentially, there are only two differences today than the illegal copying of decades past:
1. scale - it's so much easier now with Internet and computers
2. quality - analog was a built-in deterrent due to difficulty in making quality copies
siruspernot, another thing to keep in mind with tapes is that they had built in copy protection as a flaw in the medium. Sure, you could create a couple mix tapes but as an analog format each generation degraded until eventually it was trash. The threshold certainly wasn't only once and people lived with it because it's what they had but given the poor quality of tapes without being mixed mass piracy wasn't practical.
Also, because it was a physical piece of media you or someone you know had to have the music (unless you're taping off the radio) so there was some investment still happening, today, all you need is one guy to buy the cd and the whole world can listen.
Edit: man Leonardo beet me to both points while I was typing. Nice.