BC

@Sebastian Anthony "Ignoring BitTorrent would simply be a case of biased reporting."

That's a BS argument. Why don't you post information about how to steal products from stores without setting off their theft protection devices? Why not post about how to ruffie women in bars? How about how to trade child pornography and not get caught? How about posting information on how to spread viruses on the internet, hack into people's email accounts, or send spam and not get caught? All of those last few are computer related. What, now you suddenly found your moral center? Not reporting on those things must make you guilty of "biased reporting", doesn't it? You suddenly see yourself as enabling bad behavior on the internet? Sounds like a double standard to me. Almost as if you *approve* of piracy and want to help people commit it.

You know: some of us are software developers and do not appreciate sites like Download Squad publishing information to help people not pay us for our hard work. As far as I see it, Download Squad is getting Ad revenue by screwing over people doing work to keep the public entertained and more productive. Seems awfully selfish of you.

Out of curiousity, I looked up Pioneer One's numbers. They're saying they are "VODO's biggest success to date with over 450,000 downloads since its release". They also received $30,035 in donations. If you're keeping track, this works out to about 6.7 cents donated, on average, per download for "the biggest success to date". No very impressive.

Virtually no one lives the rest of their lives on their copyrights. The fact that copyright terms are too long is largely irrelevant. I'd have a little more respect for pirates if they could say things like "copyright should last for 10 years; out of principle I won't pirate anything less than 10 years old". But, they don't. The pirate attitude is more along the lines of "I'll take it without paying because I can" and "what bad things have the RIAA or MPAA done that will allow me to justify my bad actions?". I'm surprised that pirates haven't already convinced themselves that stealing from Walmart is okay based on the excuses that Walmart cracks down on unions and hurts mom-and-pop stores. We all get tired of the same sad old pirate excuses for their own greed.

Sebastian said "If the television, film and music industries would just make it easy for us -- the whole world! not just select countries! -- to get our hands on reasonably-priced, high-quality media... well, I think we all know what would happen. Piracy would dry up in an instant."

People are commenting that media IS reasonably priced in the developed world, but piracy in the developed world has not "dried up". To say that piracy would dry up if only the publishers would let us buy "reasonably-priced, high-quality media" amounts to shifting the blame off the pirates and onto the publishers. I'll agree that reasonable prices seem to be a problem outside the developed world, but the existence of piracy in the first world shows that your statement is false.

Anyway, I think the reason publishers don't set their prices really low in other countries is that they don't want people importing them back into the developed world and selling them at a profit, undermining normal sales.

Actually, 4.1 million pirated copies is surprisingly low. I think MW2 is up to something like 8 million copies sold This means there are more purchased copies than pirated copies. Numbers I've seen from other game companies is completely the opposite. Stardock said that their first few days of Demigod had nearly 90% pirates trying to connect to the servers. World of Goo was claiming something like 85% piracy (i.e. 85% of the people with a copy of the game had a pirated copy). So, if MW2 has only 4.1 million pirated copies, that puts them well below 50% piracy.

"Anyone here ever heard of Cory Doctorow? He writes books and sells them in stores but he also releases them for free on his website. People still buy his books even though they can get them for free because they are worth the money."

There are a couple problems with generalizing Doctorow's situation to other media.

The first problem is that people like reading books in print form rather than a computer screen. You can't generalize from books (which are best-read on paper) to software, video, or music (where having a physical copy adds nothing to the experience of the media). Essentially, he's giving away a digitial (lower value) version of his books to increase sales of the higher-quality print versions. Doctorow maintains a monopoly over the print sales of his books.

Second, Doctorow is a huge ideologue. He spends a lot of time preaching about 'free media', the legalization of piracy, and how everyone who tries to stop piracy is evil. This makes a small hardcore group of people love him. This means people want to give him money to 'support the cause'. This places him in a very different category than people who are making digitial media simply for the sake of entertainment. Sometimes, I see him as degrading the entire digitial media space because he earns a few bucks (through fame-based sales) by devaluing everyone else's work (by promoting piracy). I mean, if he earns $1 but causes $10 worth of damage to other people's businesses, then it's really a parasitic business model he's using. It's unsustainable for everyone to act like a parasite.

Third, he's just one person. Books are a particular type of media that is created by just one person (or two, if you count an editor). This makes the economics a little easier (because sales have to support just one or two people), and it means it more intimate (people are more willing to give money to someone that they have a 'relationship' with). Contrast that with something like movies or software, which tend to be created by whole teams of people and can easily cost tens of millions of dollars.

Fourth, Doctorow is notoriously evasive about how he earns his money. In one article he wrote, he says that book authors simply cannot expect to earn a living anymore. Doctorow makes a lot of money writing magazine articles and doing speeches. I sometimes think that he earns barely anything at all from writing books, but he uses his books to earn him fame and build hardcore fans of his ideology, then, turns around and earns big speaking fees based on that fame and rabid fanbase. It's unrealistic to say that teams programmers can earn a giving away software and then earning a living by giving speeches. Heck, if book authors all did it Doctorow's way, the market for speaking fees would collapse because there would be too many authors and too few conferences.

I don't see Doctorow's situation as being generalizable.

Good. IsoHunt is only getting what they deserve.

> "The Net doesn't work quite so well if the Torrent indexes get shut down... the Net itself isn't actually content"

If you think the entirety of the net is composed of copyright-infringing material, you really need to visit a few more places on the internet.

This post doesn't make much sense. It says that Cash for Clunkers helped the Japanese way more than Detroit. The fact that "nearly 85 percent of the trade-ins were from General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler" is entirely irrelevant to the question of "who it helped more". The only relevant information for that statement is "General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler ... sold 39 percent of the new cars moved off the lots. On the other hand, Toyota, Honda, and Nissan, ... accounted for 41 percent of new car purchases".

So, 39% of cars sold came from US manufacturers, and 41% came from Japanese manufacturers. This means that Japanese companies benefited slightly (2%) more than US companies. It does not mean that it "helped the Japanese *way more* than Detroit". Did autoblog just mess up the analysis here, or are they involved in spin to disparage the Democrat in office?

> BitTorrent is a completely legal application with some great uses. Ever try to directly download a major Linux Distro the day it's released?

Uh huh. And the reason the torrents are gone? Is there any other reason than it was taken down due to copyright infringement?

> Cook shows talk about using a sharp knife, it's up to the public to use said information for evil though.

You could make the same argument about automatic weapons as well. Based on your argument, there should be no laws against automatic weapons, sniper rifles, bazookas, dirty bombs, cocaine, etc - because it's all dependent on how you use it.

It's rather silly how BitTorrent users like to pretend it's all about legitimate uses. Afterall, even this website has pointed to illegal torrents (just today, they list the Microsoft Office 2010 Beta 2 torrent). And their image above includes "openbittorrent" - aka PirateBay 2.0.