GPOY FOREVER.

3liza:

playstationgirl:

I don’t understand, why are you insulting and calling this person a piece of garbage when their argument makes sense?

Just because it is not the technical definition of ‘stealing’, it doesn’t mean you aren’t taking away their profits from what they made. As an artist, 3liza, you would be pissed if someone found a picture of your art on the internet and then reproduced it for their own profit, or if people never bought anything to support you because it was readily available on the internet.

Again, you can fly off the handle and say that we’re supporting ACTA, MMPA, whatever but in reality we’re not - we’re just saying that this is the consequence of illegal pirating & downloading of property by consumers that takes away from the profits of those creating it (regardless of their economic status, and whether they ‘need it’ or not).

It makes sense - if you steal and pirate everything, soon someone’s going to get pissed and trying to stop you doing it. It doesn’t mean that you’re ‘human garbage’. It means you see the logical conclusion, and can understand why it would happen. It doesn’t mean you support what ACTA proposes, it means you support a better way of doing it.

This argument would make sense IF Megaupload, PirateBay, et al had been selling copies of illegally-reproduced music for profit.  Which they aren’t.  Internet pirates do not pirate media to make money, and to claim as much is incredibly disingenuous, just as it is disingenous to claim that the corporations that control an artist’s work are doing it “for the artists” instead of as a way to immorally profit from the work of actual creators.

Then you attempt to tell me what I want, “as an artist”.  Let me tell you something about being an artist.  As an artist, my stuff is widely available on the internet.  I make sure of it.  Anyone can download my work and print it and hang it on their walls to be enjoyed, which is exactly what sites like PirateBay are doing for musicians.  And yet, because I make a good product that people like, and because people want to support me as an artist, they still buy my paintings.  It’s fuckin’ BONKERS, I know! 

By your logic, since photos of my paintings and JPEGs of my digital drawings are available in high resolution for free online, no one should ever spend money on me again.  And yet…

Here, I’ll just let Mr. Gabe Newell, CEO of the intensely-profitable game company Valve Software, let you know how things work “for artists”:

We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem. For example, if a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24/7, purchasable from the convenience of your personal computer, and the legal provider says the product is region-locked, will come to your country three months after the U.S. release and can only be purchased at a brick and mortar store, then the pirate’s service is more valuable.

Most DRM solutions diminish the value of the product by either directly restricting a customer’s use or by creating uncertainty. Our goal is to create greater service value than pirates, and this has been successful enough for us that piracy is basically a non-issue for our company. For example, prior to entering the Russian market, we were told that Russia was a waste of time because everyone would pirate our products. Russia is now about to become our largest market in Europe.

Our success comes from making sure that both customers and partners feel like they get a lot of value from those services. They can trust us not to take advantage of the relationship that we have with them.

We usually think of ourselves as customer centric rather than production centric. Most of our decisions are based on the rapidly evolving opportunities to better serve our customers, and not on optimizing to be a better game company or digital distributor. The latter focus would be more of a straitjacket than conceptual aid.

Your argument is that human civilization deserves to be punished by corporate monopolies because someone copied a Radiohead album.  That the removal of profit from megacorporations by consumers fed up with paying $25 for an album, (maybe $2 of which goes to the actual artist), is punishable with global criminalization.

But the radical idea that people will buy a product that isn’t shitty, and doesn’t come with a bunch of humiliating DRM bullshit, and is easy to purchase, and not prohibitively expensive, is not an argument that you or your buddy n8tacles or the MPAA or the RIAA is willing to listen to.

The fact that I am an artist, that I am directly “at risk” of “losing money” because someone “stole my work”, and that I’m still not interested in having my copyrights “protected” by these motherfuckers, means something.

What 3liza says.  If you happen to know any politicians, please print this out and press it, hard, against their faces.

deantrippe:

Drawing on actual paper today.

Oh just, y’know, The Doctor, holding the Cosmic Cube, containing a teeny tiny Doom.  No big deal.

*NERDSPLODE*

epic4chan:

Stephen Fry speaks truth  画

fact-host:

[source]

Wednesday Morning Knowledge.

conflictingheart:

urbanehood: Snowing again (Several seconds)

thedailywhat:

Dad of the Day: Father-to-be youngcholy1 freestyles to the beat being dropped by his unborn son’s heart monitor.

[youngcholy1.]

This is exactly as much use as I’d be as a dad.

Wait, no….

This is slightly more use than I’d be as a dad.  My flow isn’t this good.

epic4chan:

This is what is holding us back as a species.  画

Dancing

Some people just can’t take a hint.  With the entertainment industry licking its wounds in the wake of the SOPA/PIPA blackout protests, and a public and tech industry forcefully rejecting the way Hollywood has manipulated and bought the lawmakers, what happened next?

Less than a week passes, and the entertainment industry gets Megaupload taken down.

Yes, that’s right; at a time when the public perception of the way the entertainment industry conducts business and influences politics is at an all-time low, the dust hasn’t even begun to settle, and the eyes of the world are upon them and scrutinising their behaviour, they then take exactly the kind of action that has got everyone so pissed off at them in the first place.

For an industry so obsessed with image, this wasn’t a very smart move.  I’d argue that it was about the dumbest move they could have made.  Postponing this action for just a week would have at least mitigated some of the negativity, but instead they have an incredibly high-profile example of inconveniencing a large number of people on frankly spurious grounds.

“Spurious?”  Yes, because here are the problems with taking down a site like Megaupload:

1. Did the site host files that violated copyright?  Almost certainly.  But for twelve years now (starting with Napster), has taking down such sites actually worked?  No.  All it does is create a vacuum into which other, more legally robust services will rapidly inflate, fulfilling the same role for users, but giving a Sisyphean legal task for content producers.  Which is just dandy as far as their lawyers are concerned, but benefits no one else.
2. Does an unpaid download equal a lost sale?  No.  No, let’s not even have this argument.  I’m sure some sales have been lost due to unpaid downloads, but it’s insulting to suggest that every single download is something people would otherwise have paid for.  What’s more, those free downloads can have a positive effect as a loss leader - what you lose in the cost of producing the song/movie/TV show, you gain in raising awareness of your product and in widening your fanbase.  This is why a lot of musicians are willingly giving away free music - it’s advertising.  Plus, lest we forget, people who download for free are also the people who spend the most on downloads.  You punish the downloaders?  You punish your biggest customers.
3. Were copyright-violating files the only ones hosted by Megaupload?  Nope.  So a bunch of legitimate users have been hurt, and denied access to their entirely legal files, all of which serves to increase resentment of an industry that already has a serious image problem, at a time when they’re already in the spotlight after Black Wednesday.

“So what then, Seej?  Should anyone just be allowed to put anything online and hang the consequences?  What about the terrorists, Seej?  What about the pedos?  What about the terrorist pedos you sick fuck?”

…is basically the fall-back argument for why we need this kind of legislation in the first place.  And yes, I’m not denying there are some utter subhuman shits out there, and they do need to be monitored, regulated, controlled, and prevented from being allowed to pursue unambiguously harmful and hate-filled agendas.  We do need some way to deal with them.  But should we surrender our own liberties so completely, just on the off-chance that an incredibly tiny number of people want to behave reprehensibly?

And then it struck me.  Then I had a moment of epiphany.

Don’t you see?  We don’t need laws to contain those people.  We don’t need politicians and private companies interfering and being given far-reaching powers to block, ban and takedown parts of the net (that they will then, if their past behaviour is anything to go on, totally abuse and use in grossly and unjustifiably draconian ways that they were never intended for and that we were promised wouldn’t happen).  We don’t need Internet Police.

We need Low Orbit Ion Cannon.

Side note: the plural of “cannon” is “cannon.”

The Low Orbit Ion Cannon is a piece of software that floods a target IP address with traffic.  If enough people are using it, that target gets overwhelmed, and ceases to be able to respond to genuine traffic.  It’s a DDoS attack, and in the wake of Megaupload being taken offline, numerous government and corporate sites who bore some responsibility for the takedown were attacked using the LOIC, and taken down in retaliation.

The public spoke.  It said, unequivocally, “No.”

This was, at best estimate, about five and a half thousand users flooding those sites.

And that’s what we need.  We need LOIC to be legitimised, and more widely used.

Don’t rely on a single, corruptible organisation to police the internet.  Rely on the users of the internet themselves.  The more objectionable a site, the more likely it is to be attacked, and the more likely it is to shut down.  Something inoffensive would remain unscathed, while the fanatics and the nutters that are used as scare-stories to justify legislative measures would be rapidly and much more effectively attacked.  The more people who have LOIC at their command, the more effective and self-policing the whole internet becomes, with the attacks on any particular site perfectly matching, from minute to minute, the level of outrage that any particular site is causing.

No site would be above the rule of the people, no corporation could evade or ignore public disgust, the government would be just as answerable to their constituents as anyone else, no one person would be in charge, and power would be in the hands of everyone, distributed perfectly throughout the crowd.

Is this not a more elegant, democratic, egalitarian approach?

It already works.  What we need is for LOIC to become socially acceptable, more anonymous, and more widely installed.  The internet distributes power and control as effectively as it distributes information.  We don’t need some centralised body, modelled on real-world policing to control things.  Such a body is only open to corruption and abuse anyway, and can only be less-effective than everyone collectively and collaboratively making decisions themselves.  And we already have the technology.

Low Orbit Ion Cannon for everyone.  This is our internet, and we can manage it ourselves.