No, it isn't.

People will always find a way to lie, cheat, and steal if they're so inclined. If this is impacting one's ability to get paid for his work, then he's within his rights to do what he feels necessary to prevent it within existing constraints of the law. But that right starts and ends with your product and those who come in contact with it.

The government does not need more power. Nor do content creators need the power to act as judge, jury, and executioner. There are already means to deal with infringements through due processes, and those processes exist for good reason; the ability to act unilaterally inevitably leads to abuses.

I say this as an enterprise software developer: any means of enforcement which impacts the freedoms or rights of anyone other than you, your customers, and those specifically infringing on your rights are not acceptable. Period.

Your rights do not outweigh those of anyone else.

Well said.

Thanks Doc . Not doing too much "better" sadly. Hopefully though that'll change on the 1st of next month when I see my new doctor now that I have some health insurance.

Back on topic though,

True, people do tend to not place as high a value on things digital. Economic factors though I think are a big factor for people who simply don't have the means or income but still pirate things. Maybe I'm just still naive enough to think that if given another option people won't inherently do something they know and feel is wrong, like stealing, whether it's stealing something physical or something immaterial that still holds value.

When I look at it from a kind of "Hippie" perspective I see the main flaw in our society as human greed. Everyone wants to get "paid". People don't do things because they want to or because it makes them happy to do it. They do what they do in many cases because they have to, because they have no other way to provide for themselves and their loved ones because like everyone else they need money to pay for their living and well being, food and shelter, and entertainment and luxuries. I hope one day we get to a Star-Trek type way of thinking where everyone does what they want to do because they enjoy it and not because they're motivated by greed and profit.

I think that the physicist Michio Kaku is a physicist because he enjoys physics, not because he thinks it will make him a millionaire or a rock star. Just like Frogboy makes games because he enjoys playing games. It makes him happy. If everything we needed to survive was provided for everyone's lives would be better and different from what we have now. People would do the jobs they want or like and there would always be someone to do it. Even doing something like being a refuse collector. I'm sure there are tons of environmentalists out there who would collect their neighborhoods garbage and take it to the dump and even do our recycling for us because they love the environment. If everything else, like food and shelter and a nice car and entertainment was provided for them, they happily do their job.

If food were free think of how much waste and stress on the planet we have now would stop. People who grow the food wouldn't grow more than it takes to actually feed the population because the excess would go to waste because there wouldn't be someone there wanting to buy it. How much food and other resources are thrown away in countries around the world every day? I know perfectly good food gets thrown away here in the U.S. every day and I'm sure it happens in every other modern industrial country in the world as well. We grow and use more than what we need because a value is perceived on the excess we produce.

Problems don't arise in this system until someone starts thinking they deserve more than someone else. They think they're job is harder so they should have a nicer house than their neighbor or a better car. Greed fucks the whole thing up when it could run smoothly and have everyone taken care of. If I could snap my fingers and set the world to rights I would get rid of the concepts of money and human greed. Everyone would do what they love and not have to worry about having food or a nice house. Brad would keep making games because he loves games. People in the military would be in it because they love their country. People who build houses would do it because they enjoy the challenge of building houses and innovating new designs. People who pick ferns would do it because they love plants, etc etc.

Of course we'll never see this world until our technology can magically provide for everyone like it does on Star Trek, but honestly, we don't need to wait that long to make a system like that one, without money and greed, actually work. We don't need the technology to solves our greed problem for us, we need to get rid of the greed to begin with.

I loved MU for being able to distribute my mod (SOTYR). Damn US Gov of Ass

The Collapse of the Internet has started. Will it stay relatively slow with one or two sites at a time? Legislation hasn't even been passed yet and places are either getting shut down or doing it on their own. This could be a bumpy ride a lot sooner than people think.

At the very least. Somehow, I think it'll survive... but only if Gore doesn't turn it off.

As long as there's still someone/somewhere to continue hosting/displaying the 80% of all the images on the net which are of naked women...then the Net will survive just fine....

I wonder, why didnt they continualy hit the big studios' online streaming services, for a few days.....that would hurt them most...

Their ya go 

Edit They're ya go 

Their ya go 

Edit They're ya go 

Or maybe even "there ya go"?       Lo frickin L

Yeah.

ROFL Doc 

I've always said that instead of shutting down stuff like TVShack (who's creator is being deported to the US, by the way for no good reason other than to be publicly executed for the pleasure of the media corporations) that just post links to where you can find movies and tv shows on existing hosting sites, removing the material from the host would be a better alternative. Or instead of making people, who stream movies from such sites, pay ridiculous fines, make the hosts take responsibility for their content. 

I personally can't say I feel sorry for what happened to Megaupload, mostly because of Megavideo, a site that limited how much you could actually watch at a time, without paying. It wasn't content made by Megavideo, it wasn't even uploaded by Megavideo, yet you still had to pay them to see it all, while getting constantly spammed with ads. I've long held the belief that if someone asks you for money in any way for pirated content, that mf deserves to go to jail. That's not file sharing/freedom of information/whatever, that's just robbery. That's the kind of dickery that sadly gets clumped together under the same umbrella as some kind singing his own version of a song he likes on youtube, and constantly complains about being oppressed and repressed and censored. It's not, it's just dicks being whiny dicks.

You know what I used to pirate a lot when I was younger, through an old dial-up connection? Books. Books I couldn't find in a library, books I couldn't afford to buy. Books that I read over a CRT monitor (causing some eye damage in the process). When I pirated Lord of the Rings, it was in DOC format. Was it wrong, morally and legally, yes. Am I sorry? No(apart from being half blind), but when newspapers started packaging hard cover literary works at awesome prices, guess what I got? But before that, I ran across something called Project Gutenberg. It's a site where you can find thousands of free books. I got Bram Stoker's Dracula from there for free, legally, no strings attached, no accounts, no adds, not in your face popups. It was there, anytime I wanted it, anytime I needed it, anytime I wanted to give it to someone else, without having to justify anything. That's freedom of information, that's filesharing, that's what the internet should be. Megavideo and sites like it are not that, they are the crap that constantly fuels the justification of those downright evil media corporations to strong arm governments into ruining the internet for everyone.   

Freedom doesn't mean being free to steal, it's being able to think for yourself and realize that your freedom ends where another persons' begins, but most of all, it means being responsible for your own actions. If you can't be, than others need to be responsible for you, something that rarely leads to good things, because none of us want to be responsible for the actions of others. So when the rule of law (just in its inception, but deformed in execution) cracks down on everyone, no matter what, you can't just help feeling that in some small way you could have prevented this. But hey, that would require a level of sensibility and unity of focus that the human race isn't capable of, but that's a thought wasted on such a simple matter.

People pirate anything they can because they can. Corporations seek to punish those who pirate anything, because they can. There's no moral high-ground, just a different degree of being a dick about it. Currently the corporations are winning in that regard, and beating them by being bigger dicks than them is just plain stupid. Which is why the internet as a concept was doomed since day 1.

With that, I await my morning coffee to kick in, because I'm convince I wrote half of this while sleeping.