I'm wary of treating the concept of "lost sales" too seriously for precisely the reasons you state. It's too nebulous an area to make a straightforward connection between a pirate and a legitimate customer. Of course, let's not fool ourselves: I'm sure that there are plenty of people who would have ultimately paid for the movie who didn't because they downloaded it illegally. But I don't trust rights holders when they make the argument that because n number of people downloaded their work without permission, they lost n number of sales.

Ultimately, it should be a moot point. Copyright infringement is a crime, and it should be punishable to same level as any commensurate crime. I don't doubt that financial damage is done to the rights holders by piracy, or even that it's significant, but I still think there's a definite tendency to exaggerate the impact. And I think that's dangerous, because it leads to over-the-top legal responses like the DMCA, which punish the innocent just as badly as the guilty.

Sure. I'm not certain where you got the idea that I "don't give a shit." But not all crime is theft, and piracy is not theft in the same way that trespassing is not theft, or murder is not theft.

It's quite possible to condemn an action while recognizing that it's being misrepresented. And I think most people would agree that theft is the worse crime, from a moral standpoint, than piracy: it has all the same negative repercussions to the rights holder and additionally deprives him or her of a copy. There are degrees of both immorality and illegality.

If it makes you feel any better, I didn't like The Hurt Locker when I saw it in theaters. So I wouldn't have pirated it in the first place.

You're undoubtedly right that there's a good amount of rationalization at work here. If nothing else, there are probably a good number of people who probably wouldn't have thought about the movie at all who are now predisposed against it. But I think it's easy to make the mistake of assuming that the same people who were praising the movie a year ago are the same people critiquing it now. It's just as possible that we're talking about two entirely different demographics with two entirely different takes on the same movie.

That said, I can't help but feel a little sorry for all the folks who are now being sued for pirating a movie that they didn't like. :-)

If it were theft, every pirated copy of the movie would have to come at the expense of a copy that could otherwise have been legitimately purchased. If I break into a store and steal a DVD, that's theft. If I break into a store and meticulously copy the DVD, it's not. File sharing is closer to the latter case than the former (although without the whole trespassing/breaking and entering aspect).

That's not to excuse piracy, mind you: copyright infringement is still illegal and (depending on your ethics) possibly immoral as well. But there's been a long-standing and deliberate effort among content producers to confuse copyright infringement with theft and it's not really hard to see why. Even if you feel that both crimes are inexcusable, theft is clearly the worse of the two. Plus, there are plenty of people out there who aren't familiar with the particulars of intellectual property laws who know about theft.

In short, it's a PR move. And while I certainly don't begrudge producers the right to protect their property to the fullest extent of the law, I personally prefer to call a spade a spade.

That's not technically true. In practice, there's little motivation for rights holders to go after downloaders/leechers and they generally don't do so. But they would be legally justified in doing so if they so chose.

But we're talking about BitTorrent, anyway, so it's probably reasonable to assume that there are no leechers, given the way the protocol works.

BitTorrent is peer-to-peer. Unless you've run through some unusual hoops, by downloading something over BitTorrent, you're uploading it at the same time.

If the suit was being filed against Usenet or IRC downloaders, then this would be a valid argument. As it is, the plaintiff is right about this.

Technically speaking, downloading a copy of a movie you already own may be illegal, but it's extremely unlikely that anyone will sue you for it. If they could even track you down in the first place.

But the issue here is that BitTorrent isn't a download tool: it's a peer-to-peer protocol. By default, while you're downloading any given file, you're also uploading it to others. And even if you have a legal copy of the work in question, you don't have the legal right to make it available to those who don't.

I've never tried green eggs and ham, but I do not like them, Sam-I-Am.

Well, then I suppose it's a very good thing that "a centralized healthcare system" was never under debate. The current deliberations started with a government-administered insurance plan that would compete with the private industry in order to exert pressure through competition. And even that's been off-the-table for months now.

American exceptionalism rears its head again. Our economic situation isn't great, but we're by no means the worst off in the world, nor do we labor under the greatest deficit. That other nations can manage it doesn't necessarily mean that we can manage it, but it suggests that a close evaluation may be in order.

Besides which, the cost question is a bit misleading. Our current health care industry is eating a huge chunk of our economy, and growing larger all of the time. Part of the point of reform is to stem that growth in order to save the country money: the long-term savings offset the upfront costs. Or so the argument goes, and so the CBO has found each time a new revision of the bill gets punted off to them.

There has been no credible mechanism for reforming the system without government involvement. Every one of the "alternatives" put forward has been, frankly, a joke. Tort reform? A handout to wealthy interests that would slice down only about 2% of the cost problem. Health savings accounts? Works very poorly for chronic conditions. Interstate competition? Fine, so where's the framework to prevent abuse when insurance providers flock to the state with the least regulation? The federal government would need to regulate as a matter of interstate commerce, but if the stated goal is to prevent "bigger government," then they're hardly going to be able to do a decent job of it.

The question of whether or not you should "trust" the government is a red herring. The issue at stake is that private insurance has proven that they cannot be relied upon to police themselves (nor, honestly, should they be expected to), and that the normal rules of supply and demand that might keep problems in check are too easily abused when dealing with something as essential as health care. Under the circumstances, the government is both more accountable and more responsive to the public, and increased government oversight is preferable to the status quo.

Is it a perfect solution? Maybe not. But this has been a public policy issue, on and off, for fifty years, and has dominated all other domestic policy items for almost a year now. It's not been rushed, and the parameters of the debate have been readily available to anyone who cares to look for them. And the "no bigger government" argument continues to spout the same old dubious talking points and non-sequiturs. It's not an argument being made honestly or in good faith.

Why stop there? I hear there are elections in 2012, as well. It's only fair to the American people to wait until after all the elections are over before the government tries to accomplish anything.

Seriously, though, you really want to make this argument? The current Democratic majority campaigned heavily on the issue of health care reform in 2008. The details have been debated for longer than the Patriot Act, the Iraq War, and the Bush tax cuts ever were. I can understand the position of folks who disagree with the proposed legislation, even if I don't agree with them, but the suggestion that this hasn't been given greater diligence and attention than almost any other piece of legislation in recent memory is ludicrous. And the suggestion that we should postpone controversial legislation simply because it's controversial kind of ignores the purpose of representative democracy in the first place....

The article goes considerably beyond that, arguing that the container is flawed even as an audio format. Here's the money quote (emphasis mine):

When challenged, [Ogg campaigners] will occasionally assume an apologetic tone, explaining how Ogg was only ever designed for simple audio-only streams (ignoring it is as bad for these as for anything), and this is no doubt true. Why then, I ask again, do they continue to tout Ogg as the one-size-fits-all solution they already admitted it is not?

This isn't a mod, though. By changing an existing product, modders typically don't distribute material that infringes upon existing intellectual property (theoretically, at least: I know this isn't always true in practice).

TSL was an entirely new project, built using a new engine, and prominently featuring Sierra IP. In order to release it, the team would have had to release offending IP by definition, and so it's a different kettle of fish. However, given that the team already had a non-commercial license from the previous IP holder, I won't dispute that it makes Activision look like scumbags.

IANAL, but as I understand it there's not much difference between a merger and an acquisition. Properly speaking, a merger happens when when company acquires another. There's a commonly accepted practical difference that has to do with what the company looks like after the acquisition, but that's all.

When a publisher purchases a studio and keeps it more or less intact and removed, that's considered an acquisition. Similarly so when a company is purchased and essentially broken down for spare parts/intellectual property. But when the acquired company is integrated into the acquiring company (and especially when there's a name change involved), it's considered a merger.

Square Enix is an example: legally speaking, Enix bought Square, but the resulting corporate hierarchy more closely resembled Square than Enix. As you say, Activision is another example.

You can't "lose the rights to another party." You just lose your exclusive right to that trademark. If I was to release a portable music player called the "iPod," Apple chose not to sue me into the next century, and the courts found that they had neglected to enforce their trademark on the name, that doesn't mean that I'd now be able to sue anyone using the name. It just means that anyone who wanted to could chose to name their media player "iPod" and Apple couldn't do a thing about it. It happens quite a bit, actually: aspirin, escalator, zipper, thermos, cola, etc.

That being said, I don't know if trademarks are really at issue in this case. The designers were granted a right to use Sierra IP in their agreement with Vivendi, but they pointedly were not granted a right to use Sierra trademarks. Before the 2005 cease and desist letter that led to the original non-commercial license, the project was entitled "King's Quest IX," but the name was changed to the non-trademark-infringing "The Silver Lining" at Vivendi's insistence. The issue now would seem to be the more general licensing of copyrighted IP at all, and the copyright law is different than trademark law. For one, you can't lose a copyright due to non-enforcement, IIRC.

I think the problem is, per the original agreement, the game was always subject to the Vivendi's approval before release. Now that the IP belongs to Activision, the game is theoretically subject to their approval. All Activision needs to do to kill the project dead is to refuse to approve anything.

It's a crying shame, because the TSL guys were cooperative and accommodating every step of the way. They sought out a license in the first place, and complied with every change requested of them without complaint (they dropped the "King's Quest" name from the project a few years back because Vivendi/Sierra weren't willing to grant a fan license on the trademark, for instance). But I suppose, in the long run, it's not unexpected.