torrents vs livelihood

[Tone Deft]

What? I can dl Forge's stuff for free? Where????

sweeeeet

lolz

this thread is worthless without links!

[Da hand]

You don't believe that there are plenty of people who simply default to stealing shit on the internet before actually paying for it? You are the dreamer, not me. Having spent plenty of time in a college dorm, I can tell you that MANY people think this way.

But if you, dear Nick the Zombie, read statistics that 90% of music downloads are not legal downloads, from torrent or whatever sites, those many people can't be that many. That's what i mean...just read the numbers. Your college may be a place for honest people, but outside it's different. I agree with many of john doe's points...

sound like you are both saying the same thing??

in all honesty, I think statistics can be misleading in these kinds of situations

the whole concept of "the long tail" being an example - for example, that 90% you mention might include Mariah Carey and Celine dion and whoever the Biggest superstars in India and China are - in other words, not your demographic

it might be that the 10% you are left with is still more than many of us would have accessed under the old system that relied on physical media

Exactly my thought. It doesn't really matter how much downloading increases in comparison to sales. More and more people in the world are connecting online and so you will have an ever increasing number of downloads.

The real measure is the sales. Digital sales overall have been always on the rise, so I really don't see a problem there. Physical media is on the decline - yes, because the same person will most likely not buy the album as mp3 and cd.

Most of the statistics you hear are about the big companies not increasing their profits or their profits being down. This doesn't mean they are losing money. Most of the time they are still making a profit - just not as big as before. These are also companies which refuse to change their business model when the market has clearly changed. The music market is correcting itself, if you will, making the business models that succeed more lean and more innovative.

The reality is that file sharing will not stop. Fighting it is futile. The only thing left is to try and use it as an advantage.

I have an album that I released on CD. It is not available for digital download, but I share the album unofficially on file sharing networks. Some people had bought my CD after hearing it online, most did not. So what, now at least they have heard of me. The ones that did not buy the cd probably did not like it enough to buy it, or bought other artist's music instead. I do the same thing all the time - I download music and then only buy the works of artists I am inspired to support. I see nothing wrong with this.

[mock]

Angstrom, thanks for the link. The "bitch" comment leads me to beliveve that I've learnt something from slashdot. Liberal might be a compliment for some people (actually if liberal puts me in the hippy, Larry Lessig loving group, then I definitely take it as a compliment).

Marx, I'm not too good with sarcasm, so if your comment was sarcastic then disregard this answer. I don't hang out in any forum nowadays, and I really rarely post anything in forums (or forums' subsection) attracting wide cross section of the population, I especially don't post in "general" forums. I'm here right now because I believe beta testing is important and really hope I can help.

I did not think about posting a vs. thread, but about posting in a vs. thread. Yet, as Angstrom pointed out, I am indeed an internet sissy.

Finally, if my post prevents any content vendor from flooding torrents tracker, then my post was usefull .

[Green Lemon]

Angstrom, thanks for the link. The "bitch" comment leads me to beliveve that I've learnt something from slashdot. Liberal might be a compliment for some people (actually if liberal puts me in the hippy, Larry Lessig loving group, then I definitely take it as a compliment).

Marx, I'm not too good with sarcasm, so if your comment was sarcastic then disregard this answer. I don't hang out in any forum nowadays, and I really rarely post anything in forums (or forums' subsection) attracting wide cross section of the population, I especially don't post in "general" forums. I'm here right now because I believe beta testing is important and really hope I can help.

I did not think about posting a vs. thread, but about posting in a vs. thread. Yet, as Angstrom pointed out, I am indeed an internet sissy.

Finally, if my post prevents any content vendor from flooding torrents tracker, then I my post was usefull .

Whoa Mock, TLDR mean anything to you?

...

Help, I've got hell cats feasting on my eyeballs!

[mock]

chrysalis33rpm,

No, TLDR didn't mean anything to me. But Not Worthy Enough To Think About It, would have implyed not bothering about posting an abstraction to solve the change-l issue . And believe me I did my best to be concise (as I could write pages about that topic, since IP laws, digital content and copyright infringement have been my favorite issues since 2001 ).

[hacktheplanet]

Please don't take this the wrong way, but I have not seen any evidence to justify this claim. It may be true for some people, but not for many.

I dunno. I'm sure we could both find anecdotal evidence to support both sides of the argument. The Live community is a good example. It's dreadfully apparent on this forum if you haven't bought a copy of Live. You also don't get support or quick easy downloads from your account on the main site, and it's suicide to run a pirated copy of Live at a show because it could crash at any moment. Great copy protection.

The DJ download sites and iTunes are good examples too. If you make it easier to buy something than to torrent it, people with the disposable income will definitely buy it. There are also a lot of people in this world who download simply for the sake of downloading. Personally, I'm the guy who almost always torrents something first, then either deletes it if I don't like it or buys a physical copy from a store or online if I like it. I also like to buy CDs at shows. But again, I'm just one person. I can't speak for the masses.

If I remember correctly, he did not get enough donations to make it worthwhile to finish writing his book.

Aah, I guess I missed that part. I suppose he could've released it anyway at whatever total donations, but that's up to him. I still think it's a really neat idea.

I'm a programmer in the Video Games industry at a fairly major studio. What my company is trying to do is not "combat piracy", per se, but rather reward people for buying our games by giving them a steady stream of free updates after they buy it. With each update, existing torrents become obsolete and illegal users will have to wait for a new torrent, then re-download and re-install it so they can keep playing.

The goal is that for people who enjoy the game and did not pay for it, that they'll get tired of this process and pay for it eventually. On top of that, people that legally purchased it are happy because they keep getting free goodies from us.

This is a great tactic. Make it such a fucking bitch for people to steal stuff and the benefits to buying something so high that it's not worth someone saving $60 on something when they just spent hours ripping their hair out trying to get it to work.

Steam is another good example. It's a HELL of a lot easier to download and install games on Steam for $15 than it is to search torrent sites and wait for seeders. The times I've downloaded stuff from my Steam account the transfer rate is almost 1Mb/s. On a torrent site, it could take a day at 30kbps. It's also a hell of a lot quicker to download something on Steam than it is to go to a store and buy it.

[forge]

What? I can dl Forge's stuff for free? Where????

sweeeeet

And for anyone who takes my post as an advertisment to go and check out the torrents, may hell-cats gnaw on your eyes while you slowly burn in the pit of eternal damnation!

[longjohns]

that would pretty much guarantee that someone would put it up on the web

not many have the gear for playing back video vinyl

Laser disc?

i guess i would have to check into that -

when I first posted I had in mind the more recent artsy type. but then I did look for some history and found a good page. it talked of some formats which used a groove to physically track, but I did not think laserdisc was one of those.

most interesting to me was the discs which NASA sent into space, in gold-plated copper, special format (stylus included!) with images from earth.

besides, I would still say that your average joe does not have a laserdisc player! ...and would think he's doing quite a service to the world by posting your video on the net

[longjohns]

p.s. was looking at this:

http://www.kempa.com/2005/05/15/vinyl-video/

[longjohns]

I had no idea that an S-Video cable/plug has been around since at least 1987!

I'm pretty sure I had never seen one until getting a DVD player. that was probably 2002-ish

[Green Lemon]

chrysalis33rpm,

No, TLDR didn't mean anything to me. But Not Worthy Enough To Think About It, would have implyed not bothering about posting an abstraction to solve the change-l issue . And believe me I did my best to be concise (as I could write pages about that topic, since IP laws, digital content and copyright infringement have been my favorite issues since 2001 ).

Talk as much as you want, as least you have something to say. Just don't be surprised if my eyes glaze over, I've got a shorter and shorter attention span!