Defend your Files!!!!

http://www.theinternetvshollywood.com/

If this bill is snuck through, then the same abysmal crap that happened to Megaupload will happen all over the Internet.

That is that your legitimate files will cease to be accessible by you or anyone else because a few whiny bitches decided to kill the entire site rather than ask for the few offending files be removed. Due process will be discarded in favor of absolute power to media trolls.

Read the content of the link and decide for yourself. Please however note that I do not in any way support theft of any content. I just think that this is a literal power grab by media trolls. I already signed. Will you?

Thank you for reading. Even if you decide not to support this I appreciate that you bothered to read.

*Edit* I somehow put mediafire in place of Megaupload. Fixed.

 

http://www.scribd.com/doc/98441696/...f-Against-MPAA-in-U-S-vs-Kim-Dotcom-6-27-2012

Just for those who want to read the actual court request this is promoting. The link is clearly visible on the page I put in the original post, but here it is again in easier to read format.

 

ohh! I want some more money because I want a gold staircase in my house, two private jets, and two ferraris! whatever shall I do without two of everything? [/sarcasm]

I hate people who try to enforce copyrights so that they can get a lot more money into their pockets. I know they have to get something but really? After seeing what people make in movies and the cinema industry, little of which filters down to the lower rungs, I'm not impressed. Whoever has the guts to pass this monstrosity into law should be dragged out into the street and hung from the nearest lamp post.

 

And left there as a warning to other greedy copyright trolls.

I respect that everyone is entitled to make good solid money to live off of for good solid products and/or services. But greed is never satisfied. I live off of $852 USD every month. No more than that. I am piss-poor. But I give things away when I see that others would benefit from it more than I would. Why? Not because I expect to get something out of it. Purely because I see that greed is a monster. It cannot be defeated by anyone who allows it to exist. It is negated entirely by those who choose to help others.

If the trolls had their way they would have everlasting ownership of inventions that are required for daily life. There are companies making genetically modified fruit and grains and vegetables. Not because they are actually better. Purely because they can then sue the everlasting snot out of Farmer Joe that planted a similar crop and some of the Mega-Corporation's grain cross propagated with his and/or grew into his crop.

This is not a new thing either. Pharmacies make new medications and then choose to stop producing older medications that work every bit as well. Not because they work better. They simply work differently and cannot be sold by third parties as generics. A good example of this is Insulin. I take Lantus and Novolog. Each costs about $60 per 10ml vial. They each cost several cents to make. I can buy NPH and Regular insulin and use them to similar effect with some minor changes in dosage and times of injections. ZERO real difference besides duration and resistances. However the cost is $15-20 each vial for these two.

I have been a Diabetic taking insulin for two decades already. Very little has actually changed. I could give examples about blood glucose test strips using the exact same chemicals to do the actual work. And meters doing the same exact work. They just cost five times as much now.

Ask any billionaire how much more money they need to make before they will be able to retire, and you will always get the same answer. "Just a little more." No kidding. They may use different words, but the disease always is "Just a little more.".

I am ranting. It is time for me to sleep I guess. Enjoy the wall of text everyone!

 

I dunno, "I wanna see just how many points I can get" sounds like a perfectly valid reason to keep working to me.

Rest of it's a shame though.

 

Well, it is a valid reason, indeed.

Most of these people begun with much less than they had and they tried because they wanted to try. So in most cases them retiring is equivalent to throwing the one thing that drove them for those years away, not because of money but because that's what they've been doing. It's like a mechanic retiring - sure, he's not working now, but instead he's spending a lot of time tinkering in his garage, because it's what he's been doing for all that time and it's difficult for him to throw it out of his life; and it's much difficult to do what the rich guys were doing as a hobby.


Now getting back to the topic, I do agree that some rich dullards enforcing their "copyright" laws on others for the reason of "to get more money because everyone is bad" is pretty sick. The whole Megaupload fiasco is an example of why it won't work (yeah, they caused one server to die, by breaking some laws themselves [a shame nobody really called them on that], but a lot of servers remain and they will not be able to close them all), and really, in many cases people pirate things because DRM and "bonus" crap you get with whatever you buy render its quality lower than that of pirated stuff (I did have to "pirate" a few games in my life because even though I owned them, the DRMs made it impossible for me to play them; I also "pirated" the first Ghost in the Shell movie because even though I own the disks, the quality was lower than what I've found not-so-legally; the whole thing is stupid, really).
And I've also lost quite a few files (my own files which I was free to share, since they were bits of code I wrote from scratch or sound files I made) in my life because I put them a copy on a server, and then when I needed these copies, I got a message that they were deleted because of a "suspicion of violation of copyright". The hell was that supposed to be, really?

 

To keep working? Are you sure you do not mean "To keep accumulating wealth by monopoly"? Once you have billions, you buy competitors that are doing better than you are. In reality you are degrading the quality of life for everyone else to keep on sucking at monopoly's teet.

There is no excuse for uncapped gains forever. There is enough to not need more at some point. And that point is rarely ever in the distant future unless you live in Greece. (My apologies if you do, but the truth hurts.)

Real innovations and improvements as a long term goal seem to always be second or even last priorities of the extremely wealthy. The first is simply to gain more. More wealth. More power. More control. More more.

But back to the actual topic, this sort of bill has been proposed dozens of times on a national and even international scale in recent years. Every time it must be fought or we risk becoming literal slaves. Doubt me? Run into any bugs in this or any other game? Need to post a screenshot to illustrate what is happening? Some arbitrary ruling could make that illegal if this crap gets passed. Why? Because someone would claim you were "Sharing Stolen Images of Copywritten Materials." It would not be Gaslamp Games doing it. But they would be powerless to prevent you from being thrown in prison for daring to defy the law by posting a screenshot.

Still doubt me? Think this is a wild example that could never happen? Let me ask you one question. Have you heard of ANY legitimate court in the world proving that there was any actual wrongdoing on the part of Megaupload? They were shut down and all their servers were taken at gunpoint. They have 150 terabytes of data and cannot prove there was ANY wrongdoing. Yet they still will not give back the content, much less the hardware. And they have the owner of the site in house arrest. Several mods on this very site were hosted by those same servers. Yet we cannot get access to that data.

'Nuff said. Back to Wazhack for me. Enjoy yet another wall of text everyone!

*Edit* Kazeto Ninja'ed me again! Well done!

 

As one of the few remaining big names in Apple said recently about cloud based storage legalities:
"What people uploaded and downloaded in their storage areas was up to them. One person's licensed music MP3 file is potentially another person's infringing file,"

http://www.businessinsider.com/steve-wozniak-on-kim-dotcom-2012-6

Just because it looks like it could be stolen content, that in no way means it is. I have given my example of "Saint's Row 2" for the PC many times. I cannot install the game without Steam. I refused to do so. So my solution was to download the "Stolen" copy that a release group made. It installs and runs fine without Steam. In fact, in almost all cases, I prefer the so-called stolen content more than the actual purchased content. I could name hundreds of examples. But why bother? We all know this is the truth.

*Edit* I fixed the quote and listed the reference.

 

I agree with you Omni, for all of the reasons you've said, but also for artistic reasons.

I grew up very poor and piracy was one of the few ways I could explore worlds outside of mine. Yeah, there are libraries, but libraries can only contain so much, and they do not usually have video games or music/media outside of the West. Going to the library was also not always easy for my family-- time, transportation, etc. As an artist, all media is important to me; I think people should be constantly experiencing and learning new things. It's not a matter of hedonism but an issue of human development and maturity.

When your wealth is at the point that you can buy whatever you want, you can inevitably learn much more about the world than someone who can't-- and just because they can, it doesn't necessarily mean that it is morally right. I see learning and experiencing as a human right, because...it sort of is. We all already understand subconsciously that "living" is more than eating, drinking, working, sleeping, and taking a dump at the end of the day; life is way more than that, and it should be. Art is one of the things that does that. This is why solitary confinement has been contested by human rights groups as inhumane; people are and should be more than just bags of flesh.

A lot of huge companies now dominate certain media industries, which means that they have effectively bottlenecked creative innovation in music, movies, literature, etc. I see piracy as something which attempts to level that playing field; people can participate in mainstream pop culture (because participation unfortunately often means cultural belonging) without having to completely invest their limited resources in it. Meanwhile, they can use those saved resources for other, smaller artists. I can listen to ten albums by ten artists and enjoy them all, but only really want to support one of those artists. So I'll go to their concert, which ends up pocketing them a much higher % of money than if I'd bought the album. It's not a loss of money because I would never have been able to buy those 10 albums in the first place and discover that 1 artist otherwise.

Other times, a video game may have a very incomplete demo version, or no demo at all. And the music industry constantly advertises albums based on ONE song already. Piracy opens up consumer experience and makes it about the consumer's enjoyment and needs, not the producer's bottomline. Sometimes it may seem a bit "extreme", but when you are dirt poor even a few dollars can be super important; it can mean the difference between eating tomorrow or not. And again, when you're poor you still have to find ways to entertain yourself and destress-- maybe even more so than other people who have a lot.

I think a lot of the antipiracy rhetoric that is thrown around is often ridiculously judgmental and assuming about where people are/what circumstances they are in. I have a friend who is in an abusive situation and if they had physical copies of say, a book about sexual abuse, it would be dangerous. For that person, they have no other way of safely obtaining this content that could potentially help them. To shame them for getting what they need to survive is absolutely ridiculous. I would not be the same person that I am if I did not play a pirated, fan-translated version of the never-released-in-the-United-States game, Seiken Densetsu 3. And so on. Art changes us--usually for the better-- but a lot of people refuse to acknowledge that.

Other times, the larger industries purposefully try to jack up prices. There's a very personally-meaningful album I have that would have cost $50 to import across the ocean, whereas if there were digital distribution I'd snatch it up for $10 immediately. But despite how easy it is to do that now, not everyone has digital releases because of contractual bullshit and companies keeping closed markets. The people who make DVDs and Blurays purposefully release things in phases by "region", which is really messed up. A lot of movies made in Asia and the Middle East don't ever get a chance in the United States simply by virtue of being spoken in a different language and requiring subtitles-- that's an issue of people being closed-minded, not the art "not being good enough" to make it. Some of it's better than what we have here.

On a personal level-- I think good art should be about people besides yourself. I'd rather have 100000000 people read what I write and not give me a dollar than 1 person read it and give me a ton of money. My goal is not to be rich, but to tell stories and help people. A lot of art is not made with these goals, which is unfortunate. But people like Benn Jordan have proven that donation/patron-style business models can and do work. It's not an impossibility.

 

The biggest supporter of piracy is strangely Microsoft. I can quote it too.
"Microsoft has stated that if someone is going to steal software, they want it to be their software they steal. There can be real benefits to software makers to theft, since the unit cost of digital theft is zero, or near-zero, and their belief is that some software pirates will become trained in their software and eventually pay for it. An analogous argument was made in an early paper by Kathleen Conner and Richard Rummelt. A subsequent study of digital rights management for ebooks by Gal Oestreicher-Singer and Arun Sundararajan showed that relaxing some forms of DRM can be beneficial to digital rights holders because the losses from piracy are outweighed by the increases in value to legal buyers."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digit...racy_is_undesirable_to_digital_rights_holders

But this thread is not really to support piracy. I understand what you are saying. I just wanted to blurt that out before Daynab has to bump us and remind us that we should not discuss piracy here.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was signed by my country and a bajillion others on or around 1948. Article 12 of it I memorized. I am literally quoting this from memory.
"No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks."

These laws if successfully passed would be a direct violation of this article. (Yes, it uses the spelling honour. Not honor like we commonly use here in the USA. Both are perfectly valid.)

Read up if you have not already. Remind your politicians that your nation signed this and should have the decency to honour it or should go ahead and collapse like Rome of ancient times.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Declaration_of_Human_Rights

 

I think that one is really easy to confirm. It's enough to just take a look at this forum. Or at Minecraft's forum. Or a multitude of other games. Because modders, too, create things mostly so that others would enjoy them.

Money is important, but seriously, if someone creates things for a living, he almost has to be doing that out of his desire to create things, otherwise he wouldn't manage to keep up.

 

https://act.freepress.net/sign/internetdeclaration

This one may actually mean something if enough people take it upon themselves to support it.

 

I do not have any sources on this one, only something I remembered... I think I actually read it on RPS.

Piracy does not hurt game sales usually, the only time it does to any noticeable amount is when the game is delayed in certain regions.
Most companies with a near-monopoly were pretty happy with everybody pirating their stuff and thus training on it, and later buying it when they needed it commercially.
Photoshop springs to mind, though that changed somewhat, don't know how far the crackers are with it now.
Same for Microsoft, though I think Win7 is still easy to crack.

 

We really should avoid speaking out *For* piracy. I know what you are saying, but some people will start looking at Gaslamp Games differently if we continue along those lines.

That said, I have pirated games enough to be considered habitual. Not because I have no intention of paying for good software, but purely because I do not trust demos and trials. Too many times a demo worked fine, but when I coughed up the very limited amount I could spare from my grocery budget to get the full version, it did not work at all.

Demos should be a part of the main game. The reason is simple. Look at Wazhack. The demo and the full version are the same game. The only difference is that the full version lets you continue beyond 300 feet depth. I played it a dozen or more times before I bought it. And I actually thought the full version was something different. Nope. It is exactly the same. It just removes that barrier so you can continue.

That is the right way to do what a demo should do. Games that have a demo 1/4 the size of the full version may even have dirty, rotten tricks like the fact that once you buy it and realize they spent 9/10ths the time polishing the demo and the full version is not even playable without constant crashes, you are stuck with it. They already have your money and are making the demo of the next game. They may *NEVER* fix the full version to even be playable.

But my point is not to support piracy because it lets you sidestep tricks like that, but rather to say that game makers should make demos in the game itself. That way it can be assured to work.

Windows has never made much of an attempt to stop piracy for the reason I stated in post #10 above. They have seen the light and want you using their software. As much as I want to criticize them, I cannot find anything recent enough to be relevant besides the limitations of their ridiculous file systems and refusal to adopt code literally handed to them on a silver platter to use EXT2,3 and even EXT4 file systems. (Try making a directory in Windows called "CON" and see what happens. )

That is but one of many retarded limitations of Windows file systems. But I am again way off topic. Back to the usual...

 

https://projects.eff.org/~barlow/Declaration-Final.html
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=998565

Read them. The second one is essential to knowing how to defend yourself against the "If you have nothing to hide" argument.
A few quotes follow:

My response is “So do you have curtains?” or “Can I see your
credit card bills for the last year?”

So my response to the “If you have nothing to hide . . .”
argument is simply, “I don’t need to justify my position. You
need to justify yours. Come back with a warrant.”

I don’t have anything to hide. But I don’t have anything I feel
like showing you, either.

 

The thing I find amusing about this is, its just likely to move the file sharing services to countries that dont have copyright laws (because people like easily sharing files, and thus there is a demand for it), which means there is going to be even less control on what can be put into these file hosting sites than there is currently (given allot of sites have in-house policing of protected works).

Sure they want it for the entire world I'm sure, but the reality is that isnt going to happen anytime soon when even states/provinces in the same country have variant laws.

That said I'm sure piracy has helped microsoft have the market it does today (specifically in the private market), as a fair number of programers used linux in the eairly days, and I'm reasonably sure if windows wasnt available it would have meant that allot of people would have stuck out the larger learning curve on it too.
Does make me wonder whether other companies are in a similar boat with some of the well known and used software.

I think the big notion that companies have is that pirates would buy their digital product if there wasnt piracy available, when the vast majority likely wouldnt.

 

I think the biggest problem of piracy is not monetary loss for property owners. It is the fact that we are being hunted as if we were all dirty, rotten thieves. No doubt some of us are. But the fact remains that companies like having a monopoly and will not make an effort to make it worthwhile to buy their products. Rather they want the governments of the world to go on an eternal witch-hunt for pirates.

Some few companies have realized they have to lower prices to stay in business. Then there is Adobe and others like them. Photoshop can do exactly *NOTHING* that GIMP cannot do. The price of GIMP is zero. People who are trained to use Photoshop may think it is worthwhile to buy the product for hundreds of dollars rather than learn how to do exactly the same tasks in GIMP, but the people who pirate usually have no money to pay for a convenience.

Despite nauseating claims of how much money is lost to piracy by all these worthless companies, most of the cost of piracy is in the form of money spent willingly to make it difficult to pirate the software. Guess who gets to pay for this in the end? Not the pirates. The end users who bother to purchase the software pay for all the crap that should not have been bothered with to prevent "Pirates" from stealing the software. And the worst part is that in upwards of 90% of cases, those protections double or more the cost of the product while eliminating no more than 10% or so of the piracy.

Thus they are literally shooting themselves in the feet.

DoD is actually a very good example of the right way to do things. If I had never played it, I would have to wonder if it was worth $11 for the game and RotDG. But when it was on sale for $3 for all of it, I bought five copies. I have since then given away all but one copy. But my point is made. Even if I had never played it before, $3 is trivial enough to think "Well, even if it is only fun for a few hours it may easily be worth that much." And knowing how good it is, if I had the money, I would have bought dozens of copies and given one to everyone I know. 'Nuff said.

 

Actually, Photoshop can do a few things that GIMP cannot do (at least it was like that when I last looked), especially concerning color management. Nothing of that is important for non-professional users though.
The other thing Photoshop has is perfect integration with Dreamweaver, Lightroom, Bridge etc... Also professional customer service and stuff like that, again not important for everyday use.
Though Adobe has fucked up pretty hard with their new license model, in which you rent the software for a year or so.

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/201...-you-can-resell-downloaded-games/#more-114473
This is a super important EU ruling. It states that we are allowed to sell used software licences. That includes games. One will have to wait how steam etc react to this, but it could be a pretty major ruling.