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.