thanks for contributing.

Thanks for the response. However, I'm sorry, but your argument is very wanting.

You are saying, quite literally, "because private companies should not be able to spy on internet traffic, internet traffic cannot be policed, and therefore all uses of the internet should be left alone." This is almost scandalous in its willful torpidity.

your argument effectively makes it impossible for law enforcement to engage in any meaningful oversight of everything from child pornography to bank fraud. "but" you'll say, "these are crimes, and copyright is a civil affair." except that it isn't.. or rather, what you will find yourself arguing for is for the government to be more actively involved in prosecuting copyright infringers- is this really what you want?

if piracy (i use this term as shorthand for unfettered, ahem, 'sharing') results in increased sales, then tell me why rightsholders are so against it? I find your claim about the spanish movie industry to be "flourishing" to be comedy, as anybody who can google the words "Spanish film industry subsidies" can quickly see.

I fully agree that civil liberties are important. however, they don't exist in a vacuum--for example, the reason that sweden is sweden and not somalia with regards to weapons is that swedish weapons laws are balanced. I suggest you have a read of the excellent (but dated) book "rights talk" which goes into this in some detail. while i understand that you try to frame this issue int terms of "big evil hollywood with its billions in profit" because that attracts teenagers to your cause, let's look more realistically on what's going on in sweden - the recent case and the court ruling against you vis a vis a small publisher of audiobooks is telling. http://edri.org/bonnier or are you going to tell me that the swedish audiobook firm was gaining business by having its work expropriated? how many examples, excactly, do you need of the chilling effects of piracy, companies that have gone bankrupt because of piracy, and BROAD academic studies comparing rates of innovation to IP protection (the "pro-piracy" people invariably make small focused studies to pick out statistical anomalies - like your spanish film claim which is not actually true) before you admit that really what you are after is power?

Umm.

1. I made clear that my 'wackjob conspiracy theory' was tongue in cheek.
2. your 'chain' argument is nonsense. see my response to 'RaceProUK'

law and policy does not work by slippery slope reasoning or by rigid application of principles, old testament style. until you understand this "law and policy for beginners" fact, you simply do not engage the discussion meaningfully.

for as long as there has been law, a key tenet has been that intent matters. this is the difference between murder and and a regrettable accident.

your applying of a mechanistic rule "link, therefore guilty or innocent" is naive and excludes that intelligent people can judiciously come to a reasonable understanding of what the intent of any given action is.

and this is the problem on slashdot - you think that law and policy is a series of mechanistic rules - like computer code. but it's not and it shouldn't be for any number of good reasons, not the least of which is that it simply won't work.

but you know - mark me a 'troll' - go on - call any reasoned disagreement as 'flamebait.' i've been on slashdot long enough to know the drill.

but you still in principle are not against taking the movie or novel that my brother put his heart, soul, and financial future into making and giving it away to anybody who wants it, because in your theory he has no particular right to the fruits of such labor because it's bits on a disk instead of, say, a piece of hardware like your the expensive computers and smartphones middle-class users use to view the content, right?

i kind of have always suspected that you guys are actually funded by the big studios. as ridiculous as this sounds, they have the power to go after individual users in civilized countries in a way that small producers don't. voila - startups begone. of course, this is not a serious suspicion, but the pirate party continues, in my mind anyway, to be an incoherent joke with no real politics other than "well, we are kind of against things and we'll get popular support by basically promising free stuff to young people." --- all this in a country with a nearly perfect press freedom index (reporters without borders), almost no corruption (transparency international) and extremely equitable incomes (gini coefficient).

in other words, you're a party of affluenza.

By this logic, if i make a party whose primary platform is to be against bank security systems, I can legally just take whatever I want?

gettaddahere.

we all inherently know that "religious exemptions" for good laws are BS. Political excemptions should be no different. The correct answer is: build support, get into government, change the laws.

So, do you get your goth makeup at hot topic or is it more of a mail order thing now?

No fascism in somalia! Be sure to send us a postcard.

Are there some legitimate business applications for this? Sure. a few. Not many.

Do i want this thing in my life, personal or otherwise? Well, I'll tell you what - the day that I need a glorified gopro camera to show people what i'm eating for lunch in real time, just shoot me already. You know those douchebags who wear those bluetooth phones in their ears? Goglass wearers will come accross as douchebags to them - kind of like douchebag squared for us normals.

and if you're anything like the dozen or so people i've met who also claim to be making ridiculous amounts of money on online poker, you aren't either. in my experience, online poker players are particularly likely to overexaggerate their winnings while not mentioning their losses. furthermore, nearly all such players try to tell me of the sites where there are many novice/donk players out there that can be reliably won from. none of these claims stand up to any sort of serious scrutiny for a number of reasons, and there is excellent reason to suggest that as with brick and mortar casinos, the only people consistently making good coin are the casinos themselves or the russian hackers who extort them.

Or maybe it's that when you amortize the cost of a video game compared to most other forms of popular entertainment, video games work out incredibly cheaply per unit time of entertainment and so the total spend of a typical gamer per year is actually very low. Furthermore, perhaps you, or if not you then others it this thread, are basing your idea of getting "ripped off" by comparing the free market costs of goods (which is essentially what we have here, despite nonsense or hyperbolic claims of 'addiction') against the "piracy costs" as some of you have conditioned yourself that the cost of digital entertainment "should" be near zero.

I don't play many games. I'm a WW2 enthusiast and there haven't been many shooters lately. But in general for about the price of a decent restaurant meal I could get a WW2 shooter that would keep me occupied for 40+ hours (of my life that I can never get back, but that's a different story). I have no problem with this and I further have no problem in technological means to prevent against re-license - or have you all been asleep to what this has done to prices in the ios app market and also in places like steam?

"There's no [copyright] protection for a cover?"

bollocks.

citation needed or apologize.

Joe Average gets smacked down? Is this a joke?

Do a youtube search for "Full Movie"

the idea that youtube somehow benefits big rightsholders is comical. this is why viacom, etc have a multi-billion dollar lawsuit against google/youtube, and rightly so.

Will you be willing to retract your words and make a public apology if/when he wins a substantial settlement?

what is the maximum number of possible states for the price of a shave and a haircut?