Join the Copyfight!

Posted: Tue Nov 11, 2008 7:16 am

Your efforts are very much appreciated. The entertainment industry has to accept the new means by which people can exchange information, art and culture. We constantly hear politicians talking about the 'information revolution', but if they're so aware of it, why don't legislators take action to reform copyright law so it reflects the changes this revolution was composed of? Legislation must arise from new social and economic realities and shouldn't be held back because of a powerful minority of vested interests.

Posted: Tue Nov 11, 2008 7:40 am

Al i know everything I download from where ever. I hadn't bought anyhow! So what is the lost, i ask. Question

Posted: Tue Nov 11, 2008 10:08 am

I'm not sure about anyone else,but the reason I torrent games or music or anything is pretty much so I can have kind of a "shareware" version, because from what I've seen, demos don't really do much glory to games now days. I torrent games and play them and if I'll play them for a good amount of time then I buy them, I don't want to spend $50 on something I'm not going to play. Simple as that.

Posted: Tue Nov 11, 2008 12:18 pm

I hope this did not turn too much into a self endulgent rant.

With regard to the lawsuits. This site is perhaps 'illegal' because it's allowing people to find stuff, however Google links to many illegal things. I'm sure if you searched for long enough you could find information on how to become a terrorist. The terrorist is the person who uses the information to then blow up a building rather than google because its bots found the page.

It is really up to the user to decide whether or not to actually download it and as you not actually hold the data on your servers then I think it may be hard for them to make a big case.

People have always been sharing since tapes and vhs.

I think they should be focusing on the people who sell material once they download it. This I think is bad. I think people see this as becoming out of hand and everyone turning to downloading rather than paying as the notion of 'it's ok' gets ground into the generations which could be true. Speak to anyone in the 14 - 30 age group and they will most probably download something even if they do not do it every day.

But do artists really need record labels these days as bands being able to share their own music via the internet is becoming so much easier and if people really like the band they will more often than not go to a concert anyway

Same as there is no better way to see a good movie than in the cinema.

However I think people need to keep half a mind open that nothing can ever be completley free such as a loaf of bread could never be free. I think it tends to be the younger generation, teenagers, students people without cash who download a lot. (oh crap. I'm a student)

I think that filesharing and such saying 'oh look have you heard this band, here is the album, lets go see them play' is what the internet brings to consumers. Well. Consumers who have friends at least.

Sometimes you buy something and then find it's rubbish and wish you'd spent the money on something else. All my favourite, favourite bands I buy the cd's because I like to think that if I buy a cd then they will be able to use that money to make more good music and ultimatley it comes down to cost.

I belive a lot of people do this to sample stuff before deciding whether it is really worth their hard earned cash.

A lot of musicisians have big fancy houses and loads of flash cars so they must be making enough cash. I know they work hard but so do people fighting wars.

At the end of the day however you tell it. It's really just about cash.

But I think the technology of peer to peer/filesharing is great & people find it hard to quanitfy time. People can understand why a car would cost so much but yet a photo editing package that is there, instant and is just 'on the screen' is harder to quantify and with sfotware, games or whatever you are more or less just paying for time and the product cost is a worth of that effort and time that went into it.

But no one here is an idiot, we all know this and so we go back to money again. It's an infinite cycle. I dont have a tv, I like certain shows, but most of tv is crap for me to want a tv so go figure.

Posted: Wed Nov 12, 2008 8:59 am

I have been using this site for a long time. I have used this site to download old movies that I have on VHS so that I can have them available, but I must admit I have downoaded a lot of things over the years that I have never owned. This isn't to say that I never bought anything from those artists/companies. In fact, the music artists that I really liked I actually wanted to purchase things from because I wanted to support them. Without adequate available free samplings of the artists I don't hear on the radio how else am I to know if I like them or not?
Another point, if cds, dvds, and software were not so overpriced I think I would be more inclined to pay a small portion of my student aid money for them. For now I would rather spend that money on concert tickets and highspeed internet. Surely there must be a way for everyone to benefit. Surely somewhere in this cluster of discontent there must be a way that those money hungry companies would be willing to settle with less for a higher number of clientele?
If prices were drastically lower than more people would buy and then that file sharing would not matter so much because there would be more records sold. Oh, but wait. All those people involved in production, they all need to be paid a ridiculous amount of money. You know, if gas prices were $3 per gallon and there was something that I could do to my car that was illegal that would make my car run without gas for free then I would surely do it. I think that everyone I know would do it. I think that half the country, if not more, would do it. The question then would be - why is it illegal? They may say it's because it is unsafe. Maybe it is unsafe, but it takes away money from an industry that is so tied into the economy that it would create a tremendous problem. So, why is filesharing illegal? Why is that copyright infringement?
I'll go to the concert. I might buy a t-shirt. I'll definitely get a sticker. I'll even buy that just out cd because it's got an awesome booklet. But I've got to tell you - I am not going out to buy Microsoft Word just because I need it for school, I paid my dues to Microsoft when I bought my laptop that came equipped with Vista and only Works. I refuse to purchase dvds of movies I already own. I paid my dues to the movie companies when I purchased my library of vhs videos and those dvds that I felt were amazing and deserved me purchasing. How much money do they expect every person in the country to spend on these things? I mean really, if I only paid for cds and movies then I would only be buying one cd and one movie every month or two. So, then what happens to all those bands I'm not listening to when they come to town? Am I going to buy a ticket to see them? Gosh. I don't think so.

They'll learn. They'll be out of business by then, but they'll figure it out.

Posted: Wed Nov 12, 2008 10:49 am

stuff like that is what got us in this mess

Posted: Wed Nov 12, 2008 1:59 pm

...copyright holders need to sue their customers, in the US at least. And you're right, it is due to a flaw in the copyright law, a holdover from the days when one could still control the medium of distribution. Written into the US copyright and patent laws - the laws governing intellectual property - is a clause that states that if one doesn't make a reasonable attempt to enforce one's intellectual property rights with respect to a particular work, one loses those rights for that work. It was originally included to prevent 1) unequal enforcement of the law as in "I'm only going to sue black people who violate copyright, but not whites" 2) collusion between industry giants that skirts FTC regulations due to the lack of a formal, legal agreement. See the way the law is written, RIAA, MPAA, etc. are effectively FORCED to sue their customer base against their own interests (all the data to this point support the idea that there is a direct correlation between sharing level and the amount of money a particular work makes) in order to avoid losing their legal base to stop actual pirates (you know, the folks on the corner hawking bootleg DVDs ripped from Indonesian copies) and ability to license content on a large scale to places like Netflix, Blockbuster, iTMS, movie theaters, radio stations, etc. so we can have legal access at somewhere between free and a fair price.

Sure, most of these groups are probably headed by greedy hypocrites who are either unwilling or unable to adapt to a world where, not only do THEY not control the media of content distribution, but where the primary medium of distribution (interwebz) is both low-cost and effectively uncontrollable. This means that even artists and content distributors who understand that digital "piracy" as it stands poses little to no threat to their businesses must make a nominal gesture to content protection. Why do you think DVDs still encrypt content with CSS? It was broken almost immediately, meaning that encrypting the content on a DVD is literally a straight waste of resources (in this case, computing time and electricity). It's not to allow playback - DVD players will play unencrypted content just fine. It's because using even a cracked DRM scheme amounts to a good-faith effort to protect the copyright. When faced with something like Napster, with no case law to guide legal action and no data to speak to the economic impact, the RIAA circled the wagons and played the situation as conservatively as possible, and i can't really blame them for that, given the laws involved. I still can blame them for lobbying against sane copyright laws and pushing the DMCA through instead, and I do. But I can acknowledge that this whole mess isn't ENTIRELY the fault of the RIAA, MPAA, and other groups like them.

I don't really know where that leaves us; it leaves me sharing software and music with technologies that stay one step ahead of the legal learning-curve and crossing my fingers, while simultaneously getting all the movies I want legally for $20/month. It leaves me still buying from artists and software developers who make good products, because I want them to be able to make more good products. It leaves me wondering how anyone thinks they can sue isohunt for facilitating copyright infringement without suing Google (though this is actually becoming more popular - do a search on Viacom's YouTube lawsuit), the manufacturers of blank data-storage media, OS developers, ISPs, and everyone else in the chain from original copy to the copy on someone's hard disk (this would, ironically, include the group that first digitized an analog item such as a song - presumably the company issuing the lawsuits - allowing perfect 1:1 copies in the first place).

Posted: Wed Nov 12, 2008 3:16 pm

Bless your heart.

hasjtracker wrote:

"Upload Rate 2163 kB/s, Uploaded bytes:1232.01 GB"

I am doing all i can Very Happy

Posted: Wed Nov 12, 2008 4:47 pm

hi dudes
just a small tip on an essay dealing with "stealing":

Quote:

Copyright is a “right” in no absolute sense; it is a government-granted monopoly on the use of creative results. So let's try calling it that—not a right but a monopoly on use, a “usemonopoly”—and then consider how the rapacious expansion of monopoly rights has always been counter to the public interest

The ecstasy of influence: A plagiarism
by Jonathan Lethem
try to google it, i am a newbie so no urls allowed Wink

Posted: Thu Nov 13, 2008 5:49 am

i agree that the "LAW" is not a way to provide you profit...
it was made for the purpose of giving order to this world....
well, this just proves that if a human is capable of something you just can't truly stop him/her from doing it....

Posted: Thu Nov 13, 2008 3:06 pm

thanks for that, queba, I'll try get it and read it...

Smile

Posted: Thu Nov 13, 2008 3:07 pm

Yeah man its just like google has any one sued google? i dont think so , so why should iso be sued

Posted: Thu Nov 13, 2008 4:25 pm

This copyright bs is really irritating. Art is not a commodity. It's meant to be shared to the masses. Good art have good messages, convey a cultural struggle, or just talk about life in general.

Now if people actually appreciate the art or in some cases need it, they'll be more than willing to pay. That applies to everything.

When movies or music are taken out of torrents then the only place it's going to end up in is in the shelf of "no one cares" about. Because let's face it, we download free things, if it wasn't free we wouldn't download it in the first place. Now if we really like whatever we've downloaded we'll pay for it by buying a hard copy like a DVD or download the one song we like from the CD through itunes or napster or wherever else. (CD's nowadays are full of garbage, not worth $15).
So in any case, torrents benefit the artist exponentially. It's like free advertisement.

I don't know about you guys, but if I really like something I've downloaded or really like an artist, I'll go ahead and buy the CD or DVD. If the music or movie was okay, then it's really not worth buying.

Posted: Thu Nov 13, 2008 7:06 pm

I believe the torrent scene itself is simply part of evolution. With the internet as such a powerful communications medium, the average consumer is finally able to band together to put up a fight against the media cartel. The internet has empowered people with control that is unprecedented. No longer must we take the abuse of the media titans if we want to entertain ourselves. I remember the days when I would go to Sam Ash (back in the late 90's) and buy a cd. I would drop $60 on three cd's in which maybe 10 tracks I ended up liking. $60 for 10 tracks, which comes out to 6 dollars a track. 6 times what it now costs on i-tunes. If I bought a new movie, the price ranged anywhere form $20-$40! And the true outrage here is that I payed it without blinking because I was brought up in this environment, and didn't know any better. The damn on the once narrow data river, ruled with an iron fist by the media giants, has been lifted, and the once narrow channel of content delivery (cd's, dvd's, vhs, tv) has been widened and flooded by the liquid data stream of the internet.

The greed isn't the only problem. The time of Sony, MGM, Epic, Viacom, and the like is coming to an end. But instead of these companies conforming to this change, and perhaps investing in the new technology, they'd rather spend million of dollars on costly lawsuits. These companies, like stubborn old men, would rather remain hard headed and ignorant to the reality of change, then yield to the times. They cannot face the fact that the good ol' days are over, and will likely never come again.

But I humbly believe that as with so many other things, the person in the mirror shares a big deal in the blame too. I don't know a great deal about lobbying for reform of the media titans, but I'd bet that most of the people who complain about them have never taken a pro-active stance on regulating the industry. I'd bet most of torrent users, myself included, have never written a single letter or signed a single petition calling to end the price gouging of the media mongols. While we don't share even close to a good share of the blame, we can't excuse ourselves completely, because after all democracy starts with us.

I'm glad that iso-hunt is fighting. I support them fully because the message is clear that consumers are fed up with this corporate abuse. If only we could have torrents for oil, what a great advance that would be =).

Posted: Thu Nov 13, 2008 10:57 pm

Exactly right, Marke, I like the way you talk.

'.... part of evolution...' exactly the way I see it, too.

Smile