 Sigh....
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Jul. 21st, 2006 @ 06:00 am 
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Apparently piracy is bad in this country that the government is trying to tax MP3 players just in case you have pirated music in it....
They already did this for blank CDs and DVDs, I think....
The "funny" thing is that they are right, piracy is out of control!
The same day I read this I headed over to visit a friend of mine and I carried my iPod because the walk was a long one, something I do a lot lately, and all of the sudden, Lemon Demon's Ultimate Showdowns start to play in Shuffle mode. This is my favorite song, so I thought I ought to share it him...
He loved, I told him you could get it for free from the official site, but.... He used one of those bleeping P2P programs and downloaded it that way... And a few more song from them too while he was there....
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Sometimes I think I'm the only person in Spain who doesn't pirate anything..... And I might be right!
Anyway, I had a busy week, so busy I barely blogged about it, the store still smells of burnt plastic, but since we are going on vacation soon, I don't have much work there, which was perfect timing since I had a ton of things to do at home....
I had to do some inventory to see if anything is missing, apparently the only thing I lost in my copy of Alice in Wonderland, but the toughest part was checking my game collection, it took me 3 days with my Pocket PC, I bet it would have been a week without it!
Of course, all the remodeling exposed the old cart games and consoles to dust, even though they were in closets and boxes, so I had to try each and evey one of them....
I spent half a day doing that, and I still have to test the Game Boy carts...
I also set up the last thing I'll but up on Ebay before my vacation, and my room is finally starting to look decent!
I still have quite a few things to do, but I'm sure I'll be able to do them before my vacation. I won't be going anywhere for the vacation itself, but with the horrid heat wave we get each year at this time, staying home sounds good to me!
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Yarrrrr! I be tired of yer anti-piratism. If I ever sight ye aboard a Spanish Gallon, I'll send ye to Davy Jones myself! Seriously though, a lot of users use P2P because that is frequently the only way to avoid DRM crippleware, like the crap Sony pulled on its customers with the rootkit fiasco last year. Almost all the major media producers use some kind of DRM. This policy, however, hurts their customers more than it hurts pirates, who can circumvent the "protections". Software companies that produce DRM, such as Starforce, believe that best way to avoid piracy is to cripple the users' computers to the point of minimum functionality. In the US we have major government figures (Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah, for example) who advocate placing self-destruct devices in computers that will destroy the computer if any pirated content is detected. If you think that electronic warfare with potential consumers is a good idea, then you are as insane as Starforce and Senator Hatch. The other parts of the economic situation you are missing involve the memetic nature of the Internet. As content is shared effortlessly across the Internet, the producers of good content will become more popular and be able earn more profits. Word of mouth drives the Internet, and word of mouth is peer to peer. Opposition to peer to peer under the guise of anti-piracy is nothing more than the failure of content makers to understand the new media. If these "dinosaur" content makers "die off" because they can't compete with content makers who do understand the new media, then good. That's how capitalism works. None of this will ever be resolved until copyright law is out of the hands of corporations and in the hands of the content makers and consumers. Right now, middlemen like the RIAA are buying legislation to let them stay middlemen. If copyright law becomes stricter, the only hope will be for creative commons to take over. I agree with the fact that DRM, Starforce and others only hurt the customers, but I think mouth to mouth in the internet is more than P2P, you can tell the world about a song or movie, but how you heard of it and obtain it and how the other do the same is sligthly irrelevant. With chat rooms, blogs, forums and others the word always get out there... Do P2P programs have reviews and ratings of each file? I'd love it if creative commons took over and the RIAA vanished, but as a collector I want to own stuff pyshically, and that the others don't seem to understand... |
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