I once heard a comparison between a boy on the beach trying to put starfish back in the ocean and the FBI trying to catch and arrest pirates. There are far too many, but it's cute that they try.


There's almost no way to stop them. Soon, we will begin to have to change the way we think about currency, value, and trade, or else this will mess up the economy.

Discuss.

I think piracy could change the way we see currency and such, but not quick enough for it to be a disaster. I imagine that within a few years there will be a means that will make piracy legal, but only to some extent. I say this because of this.

Napstar, they used to give away free music on the internet. No one else did this or even sold music on the internet at the time. They eventually got sued by the artists and such and had to close down. But people liked Napstar and soon similar alternatives appeared, such as iTunes.

I imagine that something similar will happen in the case of piracy in general, but I don't know what. It'll most likely be followed by a massive assault on piracy by the government. Piracy will probably become semi-legal and our Ideas of currency and value and other such things will change, but most likely for the better. So It'll probably get bad, then alot better and sort of equalize somewhere in the better portion.

I have no solid data to back this up, its all speculation at this point...

As long as there is internet, there will be piracy. The internet int he United States can't be locked down like is in China. They cannot make something equivelent to the Great FireWall of China because the retaliation of the pirate community would be unbelievably immense.

Adrian Lamo laughs at you all.

So who here opposes/hates The Pirate Bay?

Not me.

I <3 it.

since demonoid came back out i <3 it

I honestly don't think piracy's impacted trade in general too badly.

I've never heard reports of a music label or software company being forced to shut down because everyone was stealing their goods and nobody actually bought any of it.

The way I see it, maybe 1 person in 5 who would otherwise purchase music/software download it instead. I say this because there's a large number of kids in my school that don't know about Limewire, and a lot of the ones who do can't download anything efficiently because most of them run off of dialup. That and there's a lot of people who never grew up with the internet that still actively purchase things that we usually just download, and they probably have no clue how to actually do it.

I might be ignorant to the statistics, but I have yet to see a desperate cry against piracy. There've been attempts to stop it, since it obviously can't be helping anything, but all in all I doubt any one person or company has suffered dramatically due to piracy.

I've seen basically the same thing, Exilement. Despite this, the record labels, production companies, greedy artists, they'll all still say they're losing money and it needs to be stopped. They figure that if you're able to freely listen to their product without buying it, they're losing money, rather than what's really happening. They have about the same number of people buying their product that they would normally have without torrents and pirate sites, but now their product is more widespread because of the Internet. I think Internet piracy is good for the artists because more people are able to listen to them. That's all they really should care about. They shouldn't worry about the money(as they have plenty of it, already), they should care about their notoriety and their fame. Most of the artists who have their shit pirated are the big, well-known people, and you can't really find much stuff from those artists who are struggling in the musical world or whatever industry they're in. So it's kind of a compliment, really. Once you've got your shit spread across dozens of trackers, you're doing well.

In short, I like that saying from your first post, Ash.

Quote from Exilement

I might be ignorant to the statistics, but I have yet to see a desperate cry against piracy. There've been attempts to stop it, since it obviously can't be helping anything, but all in all I doubt any one person or company has suffered dramatically due to piracy.

Yeah, I've heard pretty much the same thing.
No one person or company has gotten hit too badly, but you need to think about the market as a whole. It could be worse at that level.

Piracy (on movies, games, etc) has almost NO effect on the percentage of movies and games that are purchased each year.
Piracy does not effect the economy.

The market?

I don't think you can reliably put together monetary statistics for everything computer related that's possible to get through download and trace any major loses, if there are any, to piracy.

Quote from Nodbarnacle

Piracy (on movies, games, etc) has almost NO effect on the percentage of movies and games that are purchased each year.
Piracy does not effect the economy.

And to add to that, Cox threatens to shut down your internet if you have pirated enough games/movies. Well, it happened to me, I don't know about everyone else.

Quote from Exilement

The market?

I don't think you can reliably put together monetary statistics for everything computer related that's possible to get through download and trace any major loses, if there are any, to piracy.

More than likely, that's true.

I was just presenting the idea as a thought.
So often when dealing with topics like this, the final result doesn't quite equal the sum of it's parts.
Pointing out, as a reminder, that the entire market may be more adversly affected than individual companies, seemed like a good idea.


I did not mean it to be a center for any kind of debate. Just another bit of "food for thought".

I thought of an interesting argument.

I notice that many pirates I know say that they would probably not have bought half the games, movies, and albums they have pirated, even if they had the money. This shows that they aren't effecting the market at all, because the record label or publishing company isn't actuallly losing a potential customer.