All Petzold’s examples require depriving someone else of the use of something.
Should the estate of Shakespere (sp?) get royalties every time a high school performs one of his plays?
How about the first singer of the “happy birthday” song?
Finally, how frequently do the actual authors get the money and how often do huge corporations whose only accomplishment is to have a legal monopoly get all the cash?
Unreal, blur the ip’s already! Trying to prove some sort of a point? Maybe your peers aren’t interested in proving the same point. They share the file with you, and you put them at potential risk (however small). Nice.
All Petzold’s examples require depriving someone else of the use of something.
Should the estate of Shakespere (sp?) get royalties every time a high school performs one of his plays?
How about the first singer of the “happy birthday” song?
Finally, how frequently do the actual authors get the money and how often do huge corporations whose only accomplishment is to have a legal monopoly get all the cash?
Re the blurring of network addresses: if downloading is legal, what are you concerned about? Oh, that’s right…
Re Shakespeare’s getting estate getting royalties: show Jeff your support for downloading by not buying his book and instead just download it from somewhere. Information should be free, right?
Look, I hate the record companies and the movie studios as much as the next guy, but this “I want it now, therefore I have the right to grab it wherever I find it.” mentality is puerile.
“Re the blurring of network addresses: if downloading is legal, what are you concerned about? Oh, that’s right…”
Its not legal, thats the point of why he should blur them.
Did I miss your point somehow?
the addresses should be blurred not just because of legality. It is pointing out an entry point to whomever - riaa/mpaa/crook… whomever. It is akin to randomly posting a person’s email address… Or sending out a mail blast where everyone’s email address is in the to list. It is improper- regardless of legality.
Geeze, whats with the blasting? How many of you jay-walked or loitered? Infrigment is != to stealing!
I’m also a prime advocate of uTorrent and have been using it since its conception. Did you know that BT actually acquired that from the original creator? Now that is saying something. Ludvig did better than the actual creator of the protocol could. Wow! What an amazing program that is, and it’s free!
And by the way, I alse feel that Demonoid kicks ass (as long as the servers stay up)!
Considering the episode you were looking for was never released commercially, you could make a request at the “Digital Archive Project” (http://www.dapcentral.org/) that someone with recordings of it post them up.
The DAP is a community of people who share copies of tv shows which were never released on VHS/DVD- Since they weren’t released in any commercial context, the DAP is free to publish them without risking impending lawsuit. They’re actually fairly militant about this- Anything released on DAP but then released commercially (e.g the occasional episode of MST3K) is instantly blacklisted from the server.
I got the entire season of Clone High from them. They’ve got a lot of other gems too… worth checking out.
I don’t argue that every torrented copy is a copy that would never
be purchased, or that there is not some average loss when you look
at all such copies – some people likely would pay more than $0.
But I would argue that the loss is a lot closer to $0 than it is
to the retail price.
Yes, I agree with that.
On the whole, the small loss on each torrent is made up for in volume, though.
So many comments, without one a convincing defense of Mr. Atwood’s piracy on ethical grounds. Mr. Atwood says he disagrees with Charles Petzold’s comments, and says no more.
Just because a person probably won’t get caught, and that it can be argued it isn’t exactly stealing, doesn’t make this right.
@Rob Janssen - “not releasing episodes […] is letting intellectual property rot […]” Unfortunately, that is the right of the owner. Thank the government for extending copyright well beyond anything the rest of society considers reasonable. Thank the judicial system for deciding that doesn’t matter either.
@yahoo - Actually, Bit torrent does have legal uses. In fact, I got an update to URU from Cyan Studios by way of bit torrent. I recognize that there are many gray and black market uses, but don’t forget it does have legitmate uses like a photocopier and video recorder as well. (I live in Canada, where fair use still actually stands a chance, at least until corrupt politicians change the rules of the game)
All this said, I do agree that the system is out of control, consumers are getting screwed and the entire issue has some interesting parallels to historical events like the Boston Tea Party, which individuals who felt that the powers that be had gone to far and took matters into their own hands. Oh, that and the whole revolution too. Are the stakes as high? Are the powers as corrupt? History will decide.
Just remember, when you are in the theater next time and they run the anti-piracy ad and the guy says “it’s wrong to just click a button and get the benefit of all that work without paying”, just remember how you watched that movie on TV the night before, you know, the tv hooked to the antenna instead of pay cable…
Hello jackass… seriously, hide your Peer’s IP’s at the very least, that’s just dumb and rude. Second, don’t mention the name of the actual show you’re downloading, that’s just dumb.
What are you going to do next, post a video of you stealing movies from your local Blockbuster?
The reason why there are no defenses of Jeff on ethical grounds is because there are no ethical defenses of copyright law, only pragmatic ones (which have been abandoned and replaced by some bizarre natural right of a human to all of its emanations). Trademarks do have an ethical component, but not copyrights.
He should feel as guilty downloading that show as you should if I tell you a joke I heard on the radio.
Still an issue. All I could find were shady kernel patches to get around it.
Well the “shady” LvlLord patch works ok on XP (last time I tried it), just not on XP x64.
I guess you could probably do a binary diff on the files to see what has changed if you don’t trust it. I believe it only changes the TCPIP.SYS file.
(Sorry for the double post - I got an error from your script saying that it was unable to rename 000978.html the first time I tried).
God bless uTorrent. It is a testament to good software design.
Around the time when it first came out, all other BT clients brought even a powerful computer to it’s knees by running a bunch of torrents. uTorrent can run a TON of torrents and the computer won’t so much as flinch.
Also, to all you commenters talking about how Jeff
a) was stupid to admit to what he did
b) might get sued
c) should blur the ip addresses
LOL! I hope you are all joking because this type of paranoia would be a testament to how well the RIAA/MPAA’s psychological terrorism has worked in this supposedly “free” country (soon to become a police state thanks to people like you).
Please call your Me.GetAGrip() methods. Thanks!
@ Xepol: this is where I see shareholders come in; their value is not maximized because valuable IP of which they basically own shares is left to rot instead of thriving. Duplication costs can be sort of ignored, and the rest is pretty much pure profit (again, correct me if I’m wrong). Initial production costs have been paid and the material’s not new - but still desired.
I wonder why not more of 'm are balking (or it could be that I have a completely wrong idea of the actual mechanics). Their investment money is spent on costly legal issues.
[…] there are no ethical defenses of copyright law […]
What I meant by ethics is the ethical (moral) choice not to pirate.
Aside from abiding laws because we generally agree to do that in a civil society, there’s the issue of what the content creators (and copyright holders) want. They might not mind their work being pirated, but without knowing that for sure, it doesn’t seem right to assume it’s OK.