[Laharl]

with more and more filesharing sites being closed down for being 'illegal', i'd like to hear people's opinion on the topic, is torrenting and the like as evil as the police make out or is a necessisity in these times?

Demonvoid was raided and closed a few weeks ago, and i got my comp working to find my favourite music source, albumbase had been raided and closed by the FBI.

i'm very much pro-piracy, i get most of my music, anime and computer programs through torrents, mostly on the grounds of freeness and convinience

thoughts?

[Golden Legacy]

Piracy is wrong, Piracy is immoral, Piracy undermines the very work that artists and animators and studios put into their material.

That said, every song, video, and anime stuff I have is pirated - that's what you call being a major hypocrite :P.

But in all seriousness, I don't see why they have to be so strict with it. I'm for it, so long as people don't foolishly go around downloading gigabytes of content all at once and being obvious about it.

[Nosferatu]

laharl the slayer, on Dec 5 2007, 04:23 AM, said:

i'm very much pro-piracy, i get most of my music, anime and computer programs through torrents, mostly on the grounds of freeness and convinience

I don't think I own a single song that hasn't been downloaded. I just mainly watch all of my Anime on Stage6. Except Lucky Star, Rozen Maiden and FMA. Those are mine now.

Games are a different subject. I respect the gaming community to buy or rent something instead of downloading it.

[Folcon]

Golden Legacy, on Dec 5 2007, 01:57 PM, said:

But in all seriousness, I don't see why they have to be so strict with it. I'm for it, so long as people don't foolishly go around downloading gigabytes of content all at once and being obvious about it.

Nosferatu, on Dec 5 2007, 03:42 PM, said:

Games are a different subject. I respect the gaming community to buy or rent something instead of downloading it.

I agree with both of those statments. The only time I might consider pirating something, is if it is a program need for a class that costs in the hundreds of dollars, but that class is the only one that needs, or uses, that program. Damn overpriced software. But I won't do that with CS3, no sir. That will be a legit copy that I get, even if the student price is about three to four hundred dollars, depending of which package, and can run up to $500 for the full bundle.

[Moonear]

I believe piracy isn't bad, unless you do it in excess. I won't go downloading hundreds of songs at once, but I'll download a few every week or so. I never buy or download pirated games, but I do watch TV shows online. Does watching TV online count as piracy?

[Folcon]

I guess it could depend on the source. For instance, watching Heros on NBC.com or Lost on ABC.com is perfectly fine, they own the rights to the shows. In fact, its not piracy at all because your not buying or comeing into postion of the material. Now borrowing a pireted copy of a movie from a friend and watching it is still piracy.

[My Best Wishes]

I download music, like everyone else, because it's fast and easy, and because when you get to stage that my friend and I are at, we couldn't afford to buy the amount of music we go through.
I also download Heroes and Supernatural on a weekly basis because the USA is sometimes two weeks ahead of Australia and I'm not patient.
I buy fake games for my PS2 and Wii, and I download Rom's for my DS.

The only thing I probably actually buy is DVD's (My family easily has over 500) becuase I hate poor quailty movies, and I buy books.
I guess you could say piracy is wrong, but so is Nintendo charging $80AUD for Dogz2 :P

[Someone Else]

Overpriced goods is wrong.

So is piracy.

So, prices should be lowered to try and prevent piracy. ROFL

I've downloaded nearly all the Sims 2 expansion packs because I hate EA's guts. It really isn't worth it to buy $30US worth of software each when it doesn't really change the game THAT much.

Other than that, I've never downloaded illegally that I can recall. It's the same as stealing. If you enjoy a product, you should support the people who created it by actually buying it with your money.

Police should crack down on people who download games illegally. It hurts gaming, particularly for PCs.

[Laharl]

Wind Dude, on Dec 6 2007, 01:00 AM, said:

If you enjoy a product, you should support the people who created it by actually buying it with your money.

'illegal' downloads do A LOT more for the popularity of the more obscure artists than sales ever could. Some albums are sooo rare, the chances of finding them on original are very slim and even if you do its going to cost you a kidney. The last albums i bought on original cost me $25/$50 each because of import costs.

most of the anime i torrent is fansubs therefore fine, although i will track down licensed things too as i really dont want to be paying £100+ per series.

I dont know anyone who has actually purchased photoshop legally XD. £700!? **** that

[Folcon]

well student pricing is nice, i just wish they had games with student discounts.

[Ironsight]

To me, it really depends on what your Pirating. If its some overpriced item, then thats ok. But if your just pirating so you dont have to drive to Target or something, then thats bad in my opinion.

[Eugine]

Piracy is 'illegal', but I believe it is well deserved. I will never buy music in my lifetime until the "Big Four" policies changes. Most of the profits are sent to the executives rather than the talents, ie the artists, and I think that's insane. Same goes for movies, but I doubt it's the same for gaming.

[Golden Legacy]

.eugine, on Dec 6 2007, 12:05 AM, said:

Piracy is 'illegal', but I believe it is well deserved. I will never buy music in my lifetime until the "Big Four" policies changes. Most of the profits are sent to the executives rather than the talents, ie the artists, and I think that's insane. Same goes for movies, but I doubt it's the same for gaming.

The "Big Four"... I'm sure I've heard of that before. Clarify for us Eugine?

[Eugine]

Warner, Sony BMG, Universal and EMI. They control over 70% of the music industry market and basically can determine the price we pay for music. I'm sure they're even a cartel, and price fix music rather than give us at a reasonable price >>

[Caael]

I pirate music and TV ( used to download DS games but I dont play it anymore). Never films ( apart from transformers) because I love going into town to see them with my friends. Games are impossible to find anyway to download.

[Golden Legacy]

.eugine, on Dec 6 2007, 07:19 AM, said:

Warner, Sony BMG, Universal and EMI. They control over 70% of the music industry market and basically can determine the price we pay for music. I'm sure they're even a cartel, and price fix music rather than give us at a reasonable price >>

Ahh, thanks for the info. It does sound like a cartel/oligopoly of sorts, but it also means that artists that aren't affiliated with those big names probably have a harder time getting their music out there to the public and recognized.

Earth Dude, on Dec 6 2007, 05:40 PM, said:

I pirate music and TV ( used to download DS games but I dont play it anymore). Never films ( apart from transformers) because I love going into town to see them with my friends. Games are impossible to find anyway to download.

Actually, my best friend bought a 1 gigabyte flash card specifically for the DS - and on it he has literally every single major DS title you can imagine... LoZ: Phantom Hourglass, Metroid Prime: Hunters, Mario Kart, Castlevania, Pokemon, Kirby Canvas Curse, Star Fox: Command... all of it, accessible from the menu of a single flash SD card.

Pretty darn tempting, if I do say so myself. :P

[Caael]

Golden Legacy, on Dec 7 2007, 03:50 AM, said:

Ahh, thanks for the info. It does sound like a cartel/oligopoly of sorts, but it also means that artists that aren't affiliated with those big names probably have a harder time getting their music out there to the public and recognized.



Actually, my best friend bought a 1 gigabyte flash card specifically for the DS - and on it he has literally every single major DS title you can imagine... LoZ: Phantom Hourglass, Metroid Prime: Hunters, Mario Kart, Castlevania, Pokemon, Kirby Canvas Curse, Star Fox: Command... all of it, accessible from the menu of a single flash SD card.

Pretty darn tempting, if I do say so myself. :P

That's what I have. I got it in Thailand in the summer, it's called SuperCard.

[Toasty]

Well first off, it's illegal. That pretty much makes it wrong. Second off, all my music, anime, an most of the programs I use I got from torrents. :P But as for the games I get from torrents, I play them for a while, and then delete them. Same with the anime. But I keep the music. Depending on how often I use/how much I need the programs, I either keep them or delete 'em.

I should probably lay off the downloading for a little while though. I downloaded 22GB in November, and our ISP allocates only 5GB per month.......yeah.

[Lightning Star]

I have only ever bought four episodes of anime. The rest (about 50-100 eps) are torrented.

I used to dl a ton of music, but 'cause I don't want to get caught with limewire on my computer (parents randomly check for it), I don't have it anymore. I did DL a lot of Linkin Park music, but because I really respect their band and want them to continue making music, I also bought the CD's after I downloaded the music.

Yeah, I agree with what GL said. It's wrong, it's immoral, yet I do it anyways.

[Split Infinity]

Earth Dude, on Dec 7 2007, 08:40 AM, said:

I pirate music and TV ( used to download DS games but I dont play it anymore). Never films ( apart from transformers) because I love going into town to see them with my friends. Games are impossible to find anyway to download.

It's actually quite easy to find ROMs and ISOs on the internet, if you know where to look. It usually takes a couple of years before anyone's brave enough to put a game up for download though.

I use Limewire all the time for downloading music, mostly because it's the only thing on Limewire which doesn't contain viruses. My player doesn't have a huge storage capacity, so it's useful for finding 320kbps MP3s quickly.

[kate]

well I know dling is only legal in Canada and maybe a couple other places, but it's legal for a reason. I dunno, personally I think downloading's wrong but I do it anyways :S I'm actually curious as to how they justified it in court. Oh but did u hear in the states they went after a single mother of two for sharing songs. Sued her for 200000$. insane.

[Lightning Star]

Spam King, on Dec 28 2007, 10:37 PM, said:

I use Limewire all the time for downloading music, mostly because it's the only thing on Limewire which doesn't contain viruses.

Everytime I go to download a program, it's a setup.exe, and it's always the same size, and I know for a fact that it's a virus. I dunno if it's limewire or my computer's screwed. So instead, I use torrents.

Oh yeah, and instead of paying five billion dollars for photoshop and illustrator, bittorrent FTW.

Now, for my music, I use a music download card my dad got instead of a rebate. He could have chosen to get a 50 dollar rebate on his tires, but instead got a 75 music download on puretracks.com and gave it to me. My dad's so awesome. ^_^ The only thing is, a lot of the music only comes in WMA format, so I have to burn it to a CD and then import it into Itunes, without all the ID3 Tags. It's a pain, but it works. Their music selection is also pretty limited, so instead, I just have my friends burn me CDs and music I want ^-^

[Saturos S.]

.eugine, on Dec 6 2007, 12:19 PM, said:

Warner, Sony BMG, Universal and EMI. They control over 70% of the music industry market and basically can determine the price we pay for music. I'm sure they're even a cartel, and price fix music rather than give us at a reasonable price >>

20 bucks may sound a lot of money for a cd. But for the other 30% that's basicly a minimum price they have to ask to make the CD profitable. The 5 bucks collector's item CD's they sell near christmas is actually what screws the smaller companies. EMI, Warner, Sony BMG and Universal have enough connnections to make this profitable, the smaller companies can't do this.

[Eugine]

Well, I guess you're right.

But then, with the digital revolution, smaller companies are able to compete with larger companies because of iTunes. Recently Apple and NBC had a fallout because NBC wanted more money for their music, when Apple, and the world decided that .99 Euro is reasonable.

[Lightning Star]

Haha, I thought of this topic last night when I quckly DL'ed limewire to get a song. Well they didn't have it on Puretracks, so I couldn't download it legally, and there's no way in hell I'd buy the whole CD just for one song. So then I uninstalled Limewire after I was done :lol:.

What? I had the song stuck in my head! I had to get it out or it was going to drive me off the wall!

[I'm Always BROKE]

I pretty much get all my music from torrents and LimeWire Pro (which I also got from torrents) cause most of it I can't find in any music store. Not that I tried THAT hard or anything... :) Anyways, downloading music for free hardly counts as piracy anymore. Everyone does it! There's nothing you can do about it, since most real fans of artists will still buy their albums.

[My Best Wishes]

I found this the other day while checking out Disturbed, I find it interesting and the right attiude

Disturbed's frontman recently became involved in the music file sharing controversy by publicly speaking out against the RIAA's lawsuits against filesharing individuals, despite the fact his record label is a member of the RIAA.

"This is not rocket science. Instead of spending all this money litigating against kids who are the people they're trying to sell things to in the first place, they have to learn how to effectively use the Internet. For the artists, my ass... I didn't ask them to protect me, and I don't want their protection."

Draiman also told NYRock:

"[I'm] Very positive about the internet, Napster. I think it's a tremendous tool for reaching many more people than we ever could without it. When you release music you want it to be heard by people. Artists really want to have their music heard. They want to have their creation heard by people. Nothing is going to do that better than Napster. I can't tell you how many kids have come up to me and said, 'I downloaded a couple of tunes off Napster and I went out and bought the album.' Or they say, 'I want to come see you play.' I don't really make money off of record sales anyway."

[Luna]

I liked that last part right there. 'I downloaded a couple of tunes off Napster and I went out and bought the album.'

That's exactly what I do. I just download a couple tunes and if I like it, I go and buy the CD. Now I don't even need to download songs since I use Pandora. After I get the CD, I delete the songs from my computer. Promotion of your work is always good but people need to draw a line where promotion ends and stealing begins.

As for Anime the like, downloading it is complete bull****. Stupid kiddies don't buy the Anime because they've "already downloaded the fansubs/watched it online." Obviously some people will pull the "too expensive" excuse, but think how much more money the company would have made if you would have bought their DVDs. Who knows, maybe future DVDs will become cheaper due to that continuous flow of money?

I've downloaded Anime before and watched it online but after a few episodes I went out and bought it.

It pisses me off to no end how people these days brag about having a bunch of downloaded **** in their computer. If you're a real fan, you've bought art for what it's worth. If not just shut up and don't come back till you understand the hard work that goes behind this form of art.

Even ****ing Trent Reznor had to leak Year Zero in the form of a radio on his website before anyone else could leak it. He'd rather do it himself first than let some dumbass do it and spoil the fun. No wonder ****ing Avril Lavigne sold more than him on the release day (since everyone already had his album.) People went as far as to record it FROM A MOBILE PHONE. Come on.

Spontaneous related anecdote: I was staying in NY with my sis a few weeks ago and one of the first things I did was go out to the Virgin Mega Store and buy albums of some artists I found through Pandora. Then I got back to her apartment and and left the CDs lying around. She saw them and said "CDs? Who the hell buys CDs anymore? Wtf is up with you? Seriously....CDs... what the hell." I don't have anything against buying the songs through iTunes/etc but god. It's sad to realize it's gone that far.

[Eugine]

I'm not going to support any industry that doesn't have respect for it's fellow countrymen (the RIAA to be specific).

I hope you know, when you buy the CDs most of the profit are given to executives, not the talents. This is why the writers are striking, and this is why artists and actors are siding with the writers.

I welcome the digital revolution because power will be returned to the artists, and maybe we'll have to increase piracy to show these executives that their system is broken. It's time artists are given control of their own content, and the digital revolution will do just that. Until then, I welcome piracy of music.

Also, you mention Pandora. Do you know the same RIAA, has banned Pandora from many non-US countries, and increased royality fees so much that by the end of this year Pandora will be killed?

I end this by saying the RIAA and Big Four music companies suck ^^.

[Luna]

Pandora is banned from any non-US country, but that's understandable. Also, the royalty fee thing is on the way to being fixed. It's ****ing ridiculous ): I also listen a lot to the stations on www.di.fm and they were about to shut down cause of it.

http://www.savenetradio.org/ <3

[Split Infinity]

I'm really starting to get tired of the 'Oh, but the prices will reduce!' argument. People need to understand that media piracy has an absoloutely minimal effect on world economy, and that the business is not going downhill any time soon.

[Eugine]

The music industry in the US has seen it's profit decreased by 21 percent (link) from 2006. It's having an effect. Huge one too

I hope it continues. It will only enchance the digital revolution.

[Split Infinity]

Provide a source, I'd like to see that.

[Golden Legacy]

.eugine, on Jan 3 2008, 12:54 AM, said:

I hope it continues. It will only enchance the digital revolution.

You're sounding more and more like you're leading a massive worldwide uprising against a global conspiracy. :P

To take Devil's Advocate here, though, I do feel like the fact that everything is moving towards the digital age seems a bit... less humane. No longer buying CDs, no longer working as hard because machines and technology can take care of a lot of work... I do feel as though society is losing a appreciation and acknowledgment of the honest effort behind a work of art, including music. But I suppose it's only inevitable that it comes to this - and like Eugine has pointed out, a lot of this is ironically due to the RIAA trying to crack down so much on the "piracy" of music.

[Eugine]

I did x3.
http://www.zeropaid.com/news/9166/Music+Sa...+Christmas+2007

[Lightning Star]

Alright, well first off the Anime industry has thousands of fans, and it's not just DVDs that they make money off of. Action figures and other promotional media are other sources of media that can generate funds and people can't just "download", and true fans will buy their media.

As for my favorite anime, yes, it has been licensed in the US, but I don't even like the dubbed version. As for buying the Japanese version, subbed, it's 30 f*cking dollars for three episodes, because of shipping and handling fees. Like hell I'm going to pay that much. Yeah, I'm a fan of it, but I really think they would profit more if they didn't do such a sh*tty job of dubbing it.

[kate]

here here icy. See the thing is: there's no doubt it's immoral. It is basically stealing. Someone did work and you're getting it for free. But you can rant about that all day, it's still going to happen. It's like communism actually, it was built on the basis that everyone would do their best even if they got no reward for it. Didn't quite pan out (though obviously that wasn't the sole reason). So basically it relied on the inherent goodness of man and it failed. Heck if people left an unlocked car on your front porch with no fear of you getting arrested for it, most people would take it. It's a sad truth, but there it is. Should it be made legal, no, but unless you do something about it, it's not going to stop.

and yes I brag about how much I download because good god they haven't done anything to stop it except make it more legal when it obviously shouldn't be. It's ridiculous and I love it.

[Lightning Star]

Wait wait, are you agreeing or disagreeing with me? XD

In Japan if someone steals your purse, someone else will run after them and catch them and give you back your purse :P it's pretty safe there.

[kate]

Yeah I'm not saying all people are bad, and personally I agree with you icy, there's no way I'm paying 30$ for a cd that has 2 songs I like. However with things like itunes it's becoming much easier to buy only what you want, so I suppose I can't use that. But for the shows thing it's still totally true.

That being said, there's no way you can say it's not wrong. Yeah it should be cheaper, but free? Hells noes.

[Blue]

Eh, I don't care either way honestly. I still prefer buying things just to have the original. I even don't like buying songs from iTunes, I would rather have the cd.

[Lightning Star]

Same here. I dunno, but it feels more "legit" to have the CD. Plus, sometimes they have special features and stuff on the CD's.

[Saturos S.]

and the fact that having a CD rack of some sorts is just sexy.

Just like a real good library. I'm getting one of those old English ones when I'm rich.