Assholes trying to take down PSN

[irixith]

We're not talking Intellectual Property theft though. Intellectual Property is patents, trademarks, copyrights -- any product of someone's intellect that holds commercial value.

If we were talking about IP theft, we'd be talking about stealing and making use of "SEGA" as opposed to stealing the latest copy of Sonic the Hedgehog.

IP is just a buzzword (buzzacronym??) generally used completely out of context.

[the7k]

Ok guys, the mods are taking care of it. Let's focus on whether or not Sony is evil.

Sony isn't any more evil than any other corporation. However, Sony may be more stupid than most corporations - and they were stupid because they tried to be nice.

Sony gave the PS3 OtherOS support. Why? Why on God's green earth would any company do this for their system? Did you force them to buy your operating system? No - in fact, any OS could be installed on it. And who do you think uses Linux more - your standard, upstanding citizen who pays for their software (or just doesn't know enough about computers to steal software), or the techno-gurus who are always trying to get something for nothing?

The only people who find Linux appealing are those that plan to run their own servers (i.e. no profit), those who do homebrew (i.e. no profit), those who plan to run emulators (i.e. no profit), and those who plan to hack the system (i.e. no profit). There was absolutely no angle there for OtherOS to have been a good idea, at any point what so ever - especially for a system that costs a lot more to produce than it did to sell.

The only thing OtherOS did for the PS3 was give hackers a chance to feel the system out from the inside, and cause a huge PR meltdown when they took it away because it would have been far more stupid for them to just let it stay once they realized it would mean the PS3 would become the Dreamcast 2. If Sony (or any other company) is ever stupid enough to try this again, they should work out a deal with Apple instead.

[ZeroAX]

So they can sell them to the military and universities as super computers?

And irixith, sorry in Greek copyright and IP are very similar, so I got them confused.

Anyway it is a theft of copyright.

[Niode]

WARNING: This is probably going to be long, so I'll try and make it amusing where I can.

Let me point out to you that it *IS* the same. Just because you can do it from the privacy of your own home over an anonymous proxy where no-one can see you and there is little to no risk of being caught, does not make it any less of a theft than brazenly walking into a store and lifting a physical item.

I'm getting pretty tired of hearing the "it's a copy" argument. It's clever and obfuscates the point, but surely anyone with a dose of common sense must see past that. Sure, it's a copy. A copy that you've taken and enjoyed without paying for. Just because the original still exists does not mean that suddenly they've lost no money from your theft of a copy. You, a potential consumer who would have had to potentially buy the product, didn't. In fact, your copy "which isn't costing companies any money" is actually far worse than the theft of the physical item -- you can only steal as many physical items that a) exist or b) you can carry/make off with, limiting the extent of the monetary loss. You can distribute as many copies of an item as you would like, exponentially increasing the amount of the loss. Let's use an example:

Let's say there was this new "Game X". Game X costs $5. Joe buys his copy of Game X, and then he uploads it onto every seedy FTP, torrent site and usenet server on the internet. 10,000 people download and enjoy Game X (or, since we're talking about the internet, more like 10,000 people download it and then run to their favourite message board to complain about how much it sucks). 10,000 people * $5 a pop = $50,000 that the developer of Game X is never going to see. Say 50,000 people download it. At $5 a pop, that's $250,000 the developer of Game X is never going to see. The developer must be getting pretty pissed off at this point. Maybe he's going to lapse on his mortgage payments, or not be able to afford to put food on the table for his family. All that hard work and effort blown away, all because a few self-entitled snots on the internet think they aren't hurting anyone, and that somehow the copies they downloaded have zero value.

(Aside: That's actually the crux of this whole silly issue (value) -- the availability at your fingertips of any piece of software, any music track, any movie, any game, whatever, has actually managed to devalue the content. When you file down all consumable content to just bits and bytes, it feels valueless. Ask any pirate who's been pirating since the BBS days, and they'll tell you all about pirate's syndrome. Gotta have 'em all, but fucked if play any of them for more than five minutes. The content has no value because you ascribe it so. Once you no longer have to exchange money for it, your brain automatically doesn't assign any value to it. A physical game, in contrast, has value because it's something you can touch and feel and put on a shelf. Even if that physical item was stolen, it still has value. Weird, right? However, your mental devaluing of digital content does not actually take away the true value of the product, and that's a hard line to cross if you've been at it long enough.)

Conversely, let's say that Joe walks into his local game store and lifts a copy of Game X. That's $5 that the developer will never see. Of course, Joe has his triangular hat and eye patch on, and in addition to the theft of the physical copy, he uploaded it as per the paragraph above, and now he's caused the developer to lose $50,005.

The moral of the story is:

- Joe is a dirty, dirty thief.
- The piracy is not theft, it's piracy (aka a copy) argument is so ridiculous it makes my head hurt, especially when otherwise sane, logical and educated people spout it.

Nope. Potential lost revenue does not equal lost revenue. The courts back me up on this one. Sorry.

[Hatta]

- The piracy is not theft, it's piracy (aka a copy) argument is so ridiculous it makes my head hurt, especially when otherwise sane, logical and educated people spout it.

"Is copying theft" is not even a cromulent question. Non-scarce goods are simply different from scarce goods. It makes no sense to try to treat them the same. You might as well ask "Are bagels prime?"

Sony gave the PS3 OtherOS support. Why? Why on God's green earth would any company do this for their system?

This was actually the smartest thing Sony has done with the PS3. Nobody bothered hacking the PS3 for as long as they could do whatever they wanted with it. If there were no OtherOS, the PS3 would have been hacked within a year just like every other video game console.

[Quiet Flight]

at people getting angry over this or any kind of emotional response


who cares???

[YoshiEgg25]

who cares???

the internet

[irixith]

Big block of text.

Nope. Potential lost revenue does not equal lost revenue. The courts back me up on this one. Sorry.

Proof? Just for the sake of being interested. If indeed that is true, then that is ridiculous and the problem runs much deeper than the average Joe on the internet finding various ways to justify his theft. If the legal system condones and supports that theft, I don't know what to say.

[ZeroAX]

Proof? Just for the sake of being interested..

Many torrents being downloaded by people who live in Russia/Chine, who might have fast internet connections, but no money in general, so there is no way they'd have bought your game.

And publishers take torrent sites to court, say that their game/movie/whatever was downloaded 10.000.000 times, thus they lost 500.000.000$. Only it would be very very very very very stupid, to A) count any of the millions of downloads from Russia/China as potential lost sales, and B) to think that from the rest of the pirated copies downloaded, that they'd get more than 1% of that in actual sales.

[Niode]

Big block of text.

Nope. Potential lost revenue does not equal lost revenue. The courts back me up on this one. Sorry.

Proof? Just for the sake of being interested. If indeed that is true, then that is ridiculous and the problem runs much deeper than the average Joe on the internet finding various ways to justify his theft. If the legal system condones and supports that theft, I don't know what to say.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/ar ... hvGGuz83ig
http://torrentfreak.com/judge-slams-ria ... al-100709/

Some interesting articles on the topic.
http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/UK-I ... aws-113463
http://www.econ.umn.edu/~bajari/metricssp10/ipod.pdf