Moral dilemma



  • @FrostCat said:

    <img src="/uploads/default/8588/866790c80658bd51.png" width="563" height="118">

    It's almost like IMDB knew you were coming.

    Judge Blakeyrat IS THE LAW.



  • @Intercourse said:

    But to say that most people pirate media is just absurd.

    Look, using uTorrent and The Pirate Bay is as basic of a computer skill as using a damn web browser, or Notepad. Everybody can do it, and everybody does. I have never, ever seen anybody who has access (no, not that kind of access) to a teenage kid and doesn't pirate stuff.

    That is Poland, though. When a Blu-Ray boxset consumes half your monthly pay, and without any of the first world goodies as Netflix (at least not without ProxMate), it's hardly surprising.

    @Arantor said:

    Bandcamp

    Have I already advertised this band? Trust me, they're fucking good.

    @Intercourse said:

    Spotify for me. I can listen to what I want, when I want, unless it's the song I want, for less than $100/year? I am in.

    FTFY. I tried Spotify, and found that it has gajillions of songs... only not the ones I listen to.



  • @Maciejasjmj said:

    Look, using uTorrent and The Pirate Bay is as basic of a computer skill as using a damn web browser, or Notepad. Everybody can do it, and everybody does.

    I don't pirate stuff, and neither does my wife since I made her feel guilty about it. I also don't run any ad-blockers.

    I'm firmly of the belief that if you don't think something is worth paying the listed price, then you simply shouldn't get it. That goes for software licensing too; there are plenty of free (poorer quality) clones of most of the major consumer software products if you really don't want to pay anything.



  • @Keith said:

    I'm firmly of the belief that if you don't think something is worth paying the listed price, then you simply shouldn't get it.

    The problem is, in the US you can afford a DVD or Blu-Ray without it putting a sizable dent in your grocery money. In Poland... not so much. As a student, I get about 1200 money-thingies net for my part-time job in IT; a Blu-Ray film costs about 80.

    @Keith said:

    That goes for software licensing too; there are plenty of free (poorer quality) clones of most of the major consumer software products if you really don't want to pay anything.

    So, Asylum movies would be preferable to the blockbusters?



  • @Maciejasjmj said:

    The problem is, in the US you can afford a DVD or Blu-Ray without it putting a sizable dent in your grocery money. In Poland... not so much. As a student, I get about 1200 money-thingies net for my part-time job in IT; a Blu-Ray film costs about 80.

    I'm only talking from my own, fairly privileged perspective, but I wanted to counter the claim that everyone pirates.

    @Maciejasjmj said:

    So, Asylum movies would be preferable to the blockbusters?

    I was specifically talking about software in that paragraph. For instance, I'm always surprised when people feel the need to crack Photoshop, when there are other products which can handle all of their specific needs, such as Paint.Net or Gimp. Those tools may be less intuitive, but if the quality of the UI is so important to you, you should pay the people who have developed it.



  • I want you people to know I wrote a large Nationalist Trolling post that I'm not posting, because it actually turned out too mean.

    ... it started with a rather good point, though, which is that both the US and UK have based their national identities on ownership of intellectual property (the UK invented the patent, and the US has copyright written into its Constitution), so the sentiment against piracy in those countries is likely more powerful than in countries like Poland.



  • @Keith said:

    I'm only talking from my own, fairly privileged perspective, but I wanted to counter the claim that everyone pirates.

    Yep. That might hold for the US, but not for where I (and @GOG, for that matter) am from. Our prices on movies/CDs/software are fucking ridiculous compared to income, so everybody pirates - and since you already have uTorrent, you don't exactly think "well, I'd pirate it, but I can technically afford it". You just fire up the download.

    I'd love to have a nice CD collection instead of a bunch of pirated MP3s. But as much as I try to fill in the gaps, it would take me half a lifetime to assemble all the music I have on disk - and it's not even that much.

    @Keith said:

    For instance, I'm always surprised when people feel the need to crack Photoshop, when there are other products which can handle all of their specific needs, such as Paint.Net or Gimp.

    Gimp is shit. Paint.NET is pretty cool, but is really a somewhat more advanced Paint replacement, not a photo edition tool. Fortunately, there's online Photoshop now, which actually works okay enough for simple red-eye or pimple removal on your family photos.

    That being said, you really can't obtain the actual full Photoshop the legal way. Even Elements are damn expensive.

    @blakeyrat said:

    so the sentiment against piracy in those countries is likely more powerful than in countries like Poland.

    That... is a good point. For over 40 years, the whole life in Poland was based on doing dodgy and not quite legal stuff, because you couldn't do shit via legal channels. Go to Poland, find a retired construction worker, and you can bet your ass he built his house with supplies stolen from his job.


  • Grade A Premium Asshole

    @Maciejasjmj said:

    Look, using uTorrent and The Pirate Bay is as basic of a computer skill as using a damn web browser, or Notepad. Everybody can do it, and everybody does. I have never, ever seen anybody who has access (no, not that kind of access) to a teenage kid and doesn't pirate stuff.

    Maybe in Poland, but most people do not even know WTF Torrents are or how to access them. The problem in discussions like this is that people speak from their perspective. We are all nerds, we are likely to haver nerdy friends, friends who know what torrents are and how to access them. Hell, most of us use torrents. I download Linux distros through torrenting when possible because it is so much faster.

    What I am talking about is the majority of society. The same people who see a pop-up that says, "If you want to speed up your PC 10,000 times faster click here"....and they fucking click it. That is the rest of society. Those people do not know what torrents are, and when they try to find out they burn their computer to the ground with spyware and trojans before they actually "pirate" much of anything.



  • @Intercourse said:

    Maybe in Poland, but most people do not even know WTF Torrents are or how to access them.

    Well, I don't speak for countries I've never been to.

    @Intercourse said:

    We are all nerds, we are likely to haver nerdy friends, friends who know what torrents are and how to access them.

    That I don't agree with, though. "Using torrents" is a more basic skill than "changing your keyboard layout back when you accidentally fuck it up to QWERTZ", as evidenced by the vast majority of people back at my high school.

    The geeky guys knew how to use private trackers, though.



  • @Maciejasjmj said:

    That... is a good point. For over 40 years, the whole life in Poland was based on doing dodgy and not quite legal stuff, because you couldn't do shit via legal channels. Go to Poland, find a retired construction worker, and you can bet your ass he built his house with supplies stolen from his job.

    When the law is broken (either is too far off social norms, or fails to acknowledge reality), people will break the law. It happened back in the 1920s with Prohibition, and is playing out in several spheres today.

    Filed under: next time, tell the FCC that we've got a Congressionally mandated deadline to meet, eh?


  • Grade A Premium Asshole

    @Maciejasjmj said:

    That I don't agree with, though. "Using torrents" is a more basic skill than "changing your keyboard layout back when you accidentally fuck it up to QWERTZ", as evidenced by the vast majority of people back at my high school.

    That's fine. We can agree to disagree. We deal with end users a lot though and most of them would call IT if someone fucked up their keyboard layout and not even realize that is a thing that you could do.

    Deal with end users of technology enough, and you will realize that most of them are computer illiterate and in denial about that.


  • FoxDev

    @Maciejasjmj said:

    Look, using uTorrent and The Pirate Bay is as basic of a computer skill as using a damn web browser, or Notepad. Everybody can do it, and everybody does. I have never, ever seen anybody who has access (no, not that kind of access) to a teenage kid and doesn't pirate stuff.

    for the record, i have never had cause to use bittorrent for any use other than to download Linux ISOs that were legally available, and were sourced from the distribution's website (because torrenting those is always faster than downloading over HTTP and the distro website lists the torrent for you!)

    pirate? moi? hardly. I'll wear the eye patch and fake parrot on talk like a pirate day because i enjoy cosplay and talking funny, but stealing? nope. not gonna do that***.

    *. well i will admit to ripping DVDs and bluerays to my PLEX media server instance, but i'm claiming that falls under the archive backup provision of DMCA because i don't share, use them only for personal use, and still have all the source DVDs

    **. ok, and for anime that has not been licensed for release in America, but i make it a point to buy it legit as soon as i can and am working on learning Japanese so i can buy the Raws legally and enjoy them too. and even then if the information is available publicaly (it isn't always because japan) i'll send the creators of the anime i've watched subbed an amount of money that is equal to the legal list price of the raw anime. Because they do awesome work and it's important to support that. The fansub groups i follow also get an annual contribution from me so i can continue to enjoy awesome anime.


  • I survived the hour long Uno hand

    @Maciejasjmj said:

    you don't exactly think "well, I'd pirate it, but I can technically afford it".

    Going from being dirt-poor all through college to having a fairly good job when I was done, that was one of the hardest transitions for my brain. I kept hoarding money and bemoaning not having things. My mom wasn't very well off when I was a kid either, so I guess my brain got used to "you can't afford that" being true for any amount over $10. I'm still shocked when, after assigning money to the various slots in my budget, I have three-digit sums left over for spending. (I plan to increase my 401k contributions now that that's happening regularly).

    @Maciejasjmj said:

    "changing your keyboard layout back when you accidentally fuck it up to QWERTZ"

    I know of nobody outside the IT/geeky subculture who would know how to do this in the US. Yesterday I was working on a document on the screen of a meeting and someone who produces Word documents weekly if not daily was surprised to discover that the Navigation Pane existed and that heading styles have a semantic meaning.

    Hell, I'm tutoring my baby brother in HTML, and my mother couldn't figure out how to open a file in a web browser after opening it in a text editor.



  • @Yamikuronue said:

    I know of nobody outside the IT/geeky subculture who would know how to do this in the US.

    Okay, that's a little Poland-specific (we get two layouts installed by default, one of which nobody uses). Let's say... "reinstall Windows", that's good. And one of those newer versions that just make you click "Next" all the time.


  • Grade A Premium Asshole

    The Polish are apparently much more computer literate than your average American. They are also apparently a bunch of thieving bastards opportunists.


  • Grade A Premium Asshole

    @Maciejasjmj said:

    Let's say... "reinstall Windows", that's good. And one of those newer versions that just make you click "Next" all the time.

    Most Americans cannot do that either. They call their nerdy friends to do it for them, or take it to the Geek Squad and get charged an exorbitant amount.


  • I survived the hour long Uno hand

    I guess you've never seen someone who, when typing numbers into Excel, uses a calculator to total them?


  • Grade A Premium Asshole

    Hahahaha! Yeah, I have seen that one also. Accountants who were never taught the difference between Excel and tabular pads.


  • BINNED

    @blakeyrat said:

    ... it started with a rather good point, though, which is that both the US and UK have based their national identities on ownership of intellectual property (the UK invented the patent, and the US has copyright written into its Constitution), so the sentiment against piracy in those countries is likely more powerful than in countries like Poland.

    Or maybe people outside of the US and UK are better at recognizing counterproductive laws. :trollface:


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @antiquarian said:

    Or maybe people outside of the US and UK are better at recognizing counterproductive laws.

    The anglosphere has a tradition of limited government. More than most civilizations, at least.



  • @antiquarian said:

    Or maybe people outside of the US and UK are better at recognizing counterproductive laws.

    Riiiiight.

    Let's compare how much money the US brings into its economy via. international film release with, say, Brazil. Then come at that argument again.

    I hate to break this to you, buddy, but if we were playing Civilization 5, the US already won the "culture" victory in fucking 1975 or so.


  • BINNED

    @blakeyrat said:

    Riiiiight.

    Let's compare how much money the US brings into its economy via. international film release with, say, Brazil. Then come at that argument again.

    If you read the quote from the Constitution that I posted earlier, you'll see that the purpose of IP laws isn't increasing profits, it's increasing the quantity of creative works. Also, comparing the US to Brazil in anything is an apples-to-oranges comparison that only a troll would try. Hint: the IP laws aren't the only difference.

    @blakeyrat said:

    I hate to break this to you, buddy, but if we were playing Civilization 5, the US already won the "culture" victory in fucking 1975 or so.

    And as a result, every law we have is vastly superior to the laws of other countries, I would assume?



  • @antiquarian said:

    If you read the quote from the Constitution that I posted earlier, you'll see that the purpose of IP laws isn't increasing profits, it's increasing the quantity of creative works.

    Right and the purpose of Excel is to create and manage financial spreadsheets, but that's maybe 10% of what it's actually used to do.

    @antiquarian said:

    Also, comparing the US to Brazil in anything is an apples-to-oranges comparison that only a troll would try. Hint: the IP laws aren't the only difference.

    What comparison would you like? Russia maybe? I can't think of any better than Brazil, personally.

    @antiquarian said:

    And as a result, every law we have is vastly superior to the laws of other countries, I would assume?

    No, we got the score screen and the little fast-forward history review-- WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT!


  • BINNED

    @blakeyrat said:

    Right and the purpose of Excel is to create and manage financial spreadsheets, but that's maybe 10% of what it's actually used to do.

    You're missing the point, but that might not matter. If you don't agree that having more creative works in the public domain is a good thing (which would surprise me given that you're always on about how nobody learns from history), then you can ignore the rest of this post.

    As I understand it, the copyright clause wasn't intended to establish or recognize a new type of property (property rights have historically been enforced at the state and local level in any case). It was intended to increase the number of creative works in the public domain. The method was to incentivize production by giving content producers a monopoly on copying the creative work for a limited period of time, after which the work would enter the public domain and be available for the general public to use and possibly build upon. The same concept is behind patents, which actually do work for that purpose (though it may not have been a good idea to apply them to software).

    It has been decades since any copyrighted works have entered the public domain because every time the Mickey Mouse copyright is about to expire, the copyright period gets retroactively extended. So only one half of the bargain is being upheld. And going back to your Excel analogy, the situation is as if Microsoft changed Excel in a way that made it impossible to create and manage financial spreadsheets.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @antiquarian said:

    though it may not have been a good idea to apply them to software

    The biggest problems with software patents are that the obviousness bar has been left ridiculously low, and that patent holders have made ridiculously wide claims. If software patents had been narrow and only awarded for truly advancing the state of the art (which is what patents are really there to encourage) then they wouldn't have been this noxious.

    The EU's had much less of a furore over them to date, at least in part because they're more difficult to obtain and so rather less of a feel-the-width-of-my-portfolio barrier to competition.



  • @dkf said:

    The biggest problems with software patents are that the obviousness bar has been left ridiculously low, and that patent holders have made ridiculously wide claims. If software patents had been narrow and only awarded for truly advancing the state of the art (which is what patents are really there to encourage) then they wouldn't have been this noxious.

    Agreed as to how they became this obnoxious; however, cleaning up the obviousness problem still doesn't do anything to deal with making software patents compatible with the Curry-Howard correspondence...

    @antiquarian said:

    though it was not a good idea to apply them to software

    FTFY, at least with the way the winds are currently blowing in the patent world

    @dkf said:

    The EU's had much less of a furore over them to date, at least in part because they're more difficult to obtain and so rather less of a feel-the-width-of-my-portfolio barrier to competition.

    Yeah, the troll problem has mostly been a US phenomenon, for better or for worse, which obscures the underlying issue, as I indicated above.



  • I haven't bothered pirating anything since Spotify personally on the Music front.

    As for movies I download torrents of them, but I don't consider it pirating as I bought them on DVD already and I am not spending ages ripping them all to my media server when I have a 36mb/s pipe.



  • I use a scientific calculator when doing box model calculations.



  • @antiquarian said:

    If you read the quote from the Constitution that I posted earlier, you'll see that the purpose of IP laws isn't increasing profits, it's increasing the quantity of creative works.

    @antiquarian said:

    As I understand it, the copyright clause wasn't intended to establish or recognize a new type of property (property rights have historically been enforced at the state and local level in any case). It was intended to increase the number of creative works in the public domain. The method was to incentivize production by giving content producers a monopoly on copying the creative work for a limited period of time, after which the work would enter the public domain and be available for the general public to use and possibly build upon.

    I'm glad somebody gets it, because there sure are plenty of mouthbreathers who JDGI.

    @antiquarian said:

    It has been decades since any copyrighted works have entered the public domain because every time the Mickey Mouse copyright is about to expire, the copyright period gets retroactively extended. So only one half of the bargain is being upheld.

    Never mind that extending copyright actually can take works out of the public domain! Blame Eldred v. Ashcroft...


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @tarunik said:

    Agreed as to how they became this obnoxious; however, cleaning up the obviousness problem still doesn't do anything to deal with making software patents compatible with the Curry-Howard correspondence...

    That's besides the point, you know? Some pieces of code really push the state of the art forward a lot, conceptually, and are thus reasonable things to receive extra protection. The classic example of this is the original SSL library, which was a huge leap forward from what went before (outside of the spooks); almost all modern security is still based on top of it (and its descendants and derivatives) decades later. It really did advance the state of the art.

    You can talk about Curry-Howard all you want (it's a bit like saying physical devices are grounded in Physics, frankly) but that actually doesn't really get you very far with building a whole worldwideweb of e-commerce sites and secure logins and …



  • @lucas said:

    Spotify

    It seems to have a really horrible choice of music. The whole "Rock" category seems to be just indie radio crap. And apparently, Marillion's Kayleigh is now a "heavy metal classic"...

    Netflix has what I want more often, though they often pull out crap like "you get Mission: Impossible 1, 2 and 4, but 3? NO SOUP FOR YOU."


  • ♿ (Parody)

    I'm way too lazy for shit like Spotify. Pandora suits my slothful lifestyle.



  • The problem with Netflix is that every so often I want to watch a really crap action movie for jokes and then it suggests me like every other crap movie and floods my suggestions with it. I also like watching "proper" documentaries and it has loads of documentaries that are so blatantly biased that are vaguely related to something else I have watched ... I might as watch something from the History Channel instead ...

    Spotify tends to have what I like to listen to, plus it will play my own music ... and it works reasonably well on my phone.



  • @dkf said:

    That's besides the point, you know? Some pieces of code really push the state of the art forward a lot, conceptually, and are thus reasonable things to receive extra protection. The classic example of this is the original SSL library, which was a huge leap forward from what went before (outside of the spooks); almost all modern security is still based on top of it (and its descendants and derivatives) decades later. It really did advance the state of the art.

    You can talk about Curry-Howard all you want (it's a bit like saying physical devices are grounded in Physics, frankly) but that actually doesn't really get you very far with building a whole worldwideweb of e-commerce sites and secure logins and …

    Patenting RSA would have actually discouraged the adoption of SSL, because of how it would have hindered the development of multiple implentations and the resulting network effects that made it a de facto standard...


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @tarunik said:

    Patenting RSA would have actually discouraged the adoption of SSL, because of how it would have hindered the development of multiple implentations and the resulting network effects that made it a de facto standard...

    Quite possibly, but that's beside the point I was making: it is an example of the kind of piece of software that is likely to meet a reasonable definition of patentable (well, except things have moved on since then).



  • @aliceif said:

    Tumblr SJWs

    GAH! That's one of my triggers! You could at least put a TRIGGER WARNING.



  • @dkf said:

    Quite possibly, but that's beside the point I was making: it is an example of the kind of piece of software that is likely to meet a reasonable definition of patentable (well, except things have moved on since then).

    If you look at the US software patent case law before the floodgates were opened by In re Alappat and State Street, your RSA example would be far closer to Benson, which was an emphatic no due to the patent pre-empting all uses of the algorithm mentioned in that patent, than Diehr, where the patent in the suit did not pre-empt the use of the formula/algorithm mentioned in any context where it could appear, only in the context of a very specific, patented-as-a-whole apparatus -- in the Diehr case, a rubber curing/molding machine.

    So, you're only right if you consider 102/103 (novelty and non-obviousness) without taking 101 (eligible subject matter) into account.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @tarunik said:

    In re Alappat and State Street
    ...
    Benson
    ...
    Diehr

    Fuck, now that stupid Eveningville Cross game has leaked over here.




  • Grade A Premium Asshole

    Thanks. That was a good read. I wonder how many people even know that such a petition process is available?



  • @Polygeekery said:

    Maybe in Poland, but most people do not even know WTF Torrents are or how to access them.

    In Hungary you even get laughed at if you buy software or music, or rent a movie.


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