You clearly don't understand what the US Constitution is and exactly what it is crafted to do. It is list of what the Federal government is allowed, along with a few examples of what they can not do. They set it up not to limit people but to severely limit the Federal government. If it isn't allowed in the Constitution for the Federal government to do it, then they can not do it period. The courts and the Supreme Court over the years have been allowed to get completely out of hand. They have been allowed to make Federal law when that is the job of the Legislative branch and not the Judicial branch. Judges have gotten completely out of control and think they can legislate from the bench when that was absolutely never intended and absolutely never allowed. Somehow the courts have over time given themselves far more rights an abilities than they were ever suppose to have. Just because something isn't in the Constitution does not mean we don't have that right. The founders said that all rights come from God or us or whatever, they absolutely do not come from the Government. The government doesn't give us rights or allow us to do things. It's only job is to say these things are not allowed because it tramples on the rights of others.

If you do not understand this you might want to go back to your high school US Constitution class book, or talk with a law professor about the US Constitution. You should also read the federalist papers and other letters and such written at the time by the founding fathers and the architects of the US Constitution. This background as well as Congressional minutes will given you a clear picture of exactly what the founders were trying to do. You also might want to look at how England and other countries in Europe were run at the time and how the US was trying to do things differently from them.

You might want to think again and look up all the lawsuits that celebrities have filed against paparazzi for using giant telephoto lens to take pictures through their house windows and all of that. The photographers are on public property but that still doesn't get them out of trouble most of the time. There is also the issue of you are not free to photograph just anyone for any reason you want. There are court rulings, thus laws against that as well. There is also the issue of recording people, and their expectation of privacy. There are loads of legal precedence to cover privacy. It isn't in the Constitution per-say but many will and have argued that "the pursuit of happiness" and right against "unreasonable search and seizure" are the foundations for expected privacy. Many people have argued quite successfully that those are directly things that show people have a right to be left alone, thus privacy. There is a lot of case law that backs up this idea as well. So while you think you may be right that there is no Constitutional right to privacy, I would bet that in fact most lawyers would say that is not the case and you are not looking at the intent of the founding fathers and what they wrote about before and while crafting the Constitution. Remember many of the states forced compromises on the federal government to sign the Constitution because they wanted the federal government to stay the hell out of the states business and let them run things rather than the federal government always telling them what they can and can't do. They also wanted the governments in general to stay the hell out of people's lives other than the absolute bare minimum that was required. Somehow this country has gotten so very far away from that idea. So clearly what you are saying is not correct in reality. You do have a legal expectation of privacy in the US.

I think everyone here is missing the absolutely amazing fact that this report points out. It isn't that "piracy" doesn't hurt the entertainment companies. It is the absolutely amazing fact that "piracy" is in fact a profit center for the entertainment companies. "Piracy" actually makes the entertainment companies more money. It seems very counter intuitive, but then many things about buying habits and marketing are counter intuitive.

Most people here have not applied any logic to see the underlying issue presented. If "piracy" was only about cost and nothing else then "pirates" would buy far fewer titles than average consumers because they would get everything for free. If they get everything for free and can save it to a DVD or CD why in the world would they ever buy anything? The reality is because it has very little to do with price. Logically "pirates" have to be completely stupid if they are buying anything when they can get it for nothing. So you have to ask why the logic is off. Why are they buying if they can get it for nothing and the quality is exactly the same? Why exactly would they pay when the risk for getting an exact copy is so very low to pretty much non-existant? The reason clearly must be that cost is not the issue and that there is some underlying reason that causes them to spend money when there is absolutely no need or logical reason for them to spend any money at all. This is the **HUGE** point that most have missed entirely about this report. People who have absolutely enormous amounts of exact copies of media available to them at no expense are still spending more than average consumers. That is a giant red flag against piracy. If they even spend the same amount as average consumers that would still be a giant red flag. There is more going on here and this proves that "piracy" absolutely does not cost the entertainment industry anything, in fact it is a profit center for them.

That is correct you read that correctly. This report absolutely logically proves that "piracy" is a profit center for the entertainment industry. There is absolutely no logical way to argue otherwise. If "piracy" causes more money to be spend by those doing "piracy" then it absolutely must be a profit center given that it is causing increases in sales. To argue otherwise is logically inconstant and it is lying. Entertainment companies have known this since the days of LP records. It is absolutely not something they want the general public or law makers to know because it would completely ruin their campaign to demonize "piracy' in order to get what they want for other reasons. There is a reason there have been very few convictions for individual "piracy". It's because they know it isn't a problem, and that they only have to do a very very few select legal cases to point at to get law makers to give them what they want. They want more control over the distribution channels that they know they are loosing now and probably will loose even more in the future. So they are trying to con law makers in to passing laws that are really designed to give them more legal control over distribution channels especially for the future. The entertainment companies are scared to death that they are the whip and buggy makers of this generation and that the market is going to leave them in the dust. The reality is that is exactly what is going on and the market is trying to leave them in the dust because they add no value to the product and only increase costs as a middle man. The current markets and the Internet in general are all about removing as many middle men as possible to reduce costs and this includes entertainment companies, rather than the artists themselves.

Entertainment companies are about to be completely screwed in a few short years. You can already setup a full music studio in your basement with $2000 or less and product the exact same level of product as the big studios. That freaks out the record companies and producers big time. High end professional digital movie cameras are getting better and better every year as well as cheaper. There are already a lot of directors and indie people using digital cameras to produce movies. Robert Rodriguez already shoots all of his movies on digital camera. That is how he did Sin City. He does all his music on a computer. He edits the whole thing on his computer. You can even do all the special effects needed on your computer, look at Sanctuary, Sky Captain and District 9. You can build a full production studio/company for under $10,000 at most $25,000 for extra cameras and just rent a giant warehouse to do the green screen shooting. There are a lot of movie theaters that are going to pure digital projectors that use computer files rather than tape or film. So the indie films could just send the movie as a finished file to theaters to show and not have any film/negatives costs. They can also then release the movie the same time world wide to everyone all at once. Then they can release the DVD 6 months later world wide and not worry about having to do staged releases by region. DVD replication is cheap and there are dozens of companies that do it for about $1-$2 per DVD unit, the same format and box as current movie DVDs. As you can see it has gotten to the point where technology has reduced costs so much and given professionals and the public cheaper and better tools to create their own movies, music, books or whatever. It won't be long until the entertainment companies are clearly a thing of the past. They add absolutely nothing to the end product and only increase it's costs. They are a clearly a middle man and the market forces will remove them. That is one of the things the Internet does best is to remove as many middle men as possible to reduce costs to consumers. The Internet is In fact already in the process of doing just that. That is what is scaring the entertainment companies to death, and keeping them up late at night. "Pirates" are the last thing they are actually worried about.

Capitalist societies have existed for thousands of centuries without entertainment or media being paid for by the common person. The artists still created and the people got their culture. It is only a very modern idea that people must pay for their culture. How people were ever convinced that this was acceptable I have no idea. It is one of the greatest scams ever foisted on the public that I know of in recent times. That corporations think they can control the public's culture and sell it back to us over and over again is a high crime and they should be destroyed. In fact corporations as a legal entity never ever should have been allowed. It's a legal scam to protect the people who run and own the company from the public being able to come after them directly when it all goes badly. You don't need to have a corporation to have a business. Partnerships and sole owners have worked for thousands of centuries. Corporations are just a complete scam against the public to rip them off and never pay the consequences for it. If you are not ripping of the public or trying to scam them then not being a corporation should have no effect. You could still sell partnerships in your business which is all that stock is. It's simply a method of determining how much say and what part of the profits a partner gets. Stockholders are partners in a company.

You do know why there are region locks on movies right? I has nothing at all to do with export and import restrictions or anything like that. It is because movie studios only make X number of prints of the film. They claim it is due to expense of the film stock because of the amount of silver actually used in film stock. I can kind of believe this but not 100%. So a movie company will make say 200-300 copies and ship them around the US to theaters. Once it has it run in the US, they get all 200-300 film copies back and they send them out to France or Europe or whatever. So the same 300 or so film prints make their way around the world to all the different theaters. It is stupid and wasteful way to do distribution but it is they way they do it. Which is why DVD region locks exist. Movies are released in the US and Canada first, so they come out on DVD first there. The movie may not have even hit theaters in Burma or whatever so the movie companies want you to spend $10-$20 per ticket in the theater then spend another $15-$30 to buy the DVD later.

This is why region locks on DVDs exist.

This is so very true. RIAA and MPPA and book publishers have become the buggy makers and whip makers of the modern era and they are being phased out and it scares them to death. They add absolutely no value to the created product other than controlling who get promoted and at what level and then that is charged back to the creator of the work. You could hire an advertising company to do that yourself. Media corporations are no longer needed in the age of the Internet and they know this and it scares the crap out of them. They are also scared to death that given the games they have played to get copyrights extended that artists would some how end up with the copyrights on their own creations and put them completely out of business forever given the current length of copyrights.

The problem with trying to show "piracy" hurts sales, "piracy" by the individual rather than commercial piracy, does not effect sales. There are many many examples of this and many many reports that prove this is in fact false. It is an attempt at a straw horse by the entertainment companies (games, movie, music, books, etc) that is completely false. They spend far more money on trying to stop "piracy" than they will ever recover in sales if there was absolutely no "piracy". It is a stalking horse that has nothing to do with "piracy" and everything to do with controlling the market and setting things up for the future so they will not loose control or be forced out by something cheap, better and more agile in the future. The media companies are colluding together because so many of them are tied to each other through corporate divisions and mergers and what not. They are trying to divide things up like the mafia and are using whatever means needed to do it. The DOJ really should look into the media companies, their contracts with artists and everyone including promotion, and their ties to each other to price fix and protect each other and their positions in the market. They have created artificial barriers in an attempt to keep everyone else out of the markets.

You are making way too many assumptions there with absolutely no foundation of facts. You have not proven that if you remove "piracy" that sales would increase. Why you even think that would be true I have no idea. DRMed e-books have not increased book sales. In fact if you look at Baen Books the opposite is true. If you release e-books without DRM your book sales for those authors will increase dramatically across their entire current and back catalog. So in fact this is one clear example that completely disproves what you are saying here.

You also assume they would be better customers if there was no piracy. Are you sure of that? Can you prove it? Do you know for a fact that returns won't suddenly skyrocket? Do you know that distribution costs and middle man percentages won't go up because of this? You have absolutely no proof of your claims and assumptions here. In fact there are many many examples to the contrary and no example to prove your point. If you look at indie games that have no DRM versus indie games with DRM. You see higher sales across the board for indie games with no DRM. Look at any of the reports by any of the indie distribution portals to see this. Steam is not an example of this because their games have DRM, even the indie titles. So there is another example that disproves your point.

Removing piracy does not and will not increase sales and it won't increase profits either. This has been shown time and time again.

Because it has absolutely nothing to do with profits in reality. Instead it is about whining to congress that they aren't making enough money because of the "pirates". So they get copyright length extentions. They get laws passed that try and force everyone to buy through them. MPAA and RIAA don't even like used products to be sold and have several times tried to talk congress into limiting used sales. The gaming industry is doing the exact same thing. They are just greedy and want to kill used sales because they think the person will instead buy the $40-$50 version when the market has clearly shown that is false. If people were willing to buy it new they wouldn't bother with used. People buy used because they are unwilling to pay for the product at the new price point. If I can't get used products so my choice is new or not at all, then I choose not at all. Their products are not worth that to me with my very limited budget. The media companies aren't connect with 150% profits they want to legislate 300% profits. They want to sell you the exact same product in new formats every 5-10 years so you pay over and over and over for the same exact thing. They want to renege on the promise of putting things in the public domain in exchange for a limited term of exclusive use. Personally I think if a media company isn't dropping the same number of products into the public domain every year as they get new copyrights for, then they should not be getting more new copyrights. New copyrights each year should be limited to the same number of products put into the public domain if you are a company more than 20 years old. I don't care if your copyright hasn't expired. If you can't make your money back in 20 years then you don't deserve a copyright on it. Corporations have to be held to the promise of increasing the public domain or they shouldn't be allowed any copyrights. Personally I think corporations should not be allowed to hold copyrights or patents only actual live humans, not fictitious legal creations. We are suppose to be rewarding the inventor(s) not some company that exploits their workers and takes all their creativity and ideas for themselves.

How about just show them the original DVDs that they/you have purchased? I have probably about 400+ DVDs I have bought that I could show a survey person without any problem. I could take pictures and attach it to a survey if they wanted. It's isn't all that hard to prove that you actually own a crap load of DVDs.

I am not saying there is anything wrong with Minecraft but it doesn't have any game design. Creating a bunch of things and seeing what players like and what works and then adding or removing, that is not game design. It's the idea of throw everything on the wall and see what sticks. Minecraft is very similar to Gary's Mod in terms of "play" style. There isn't a game, just something cool to play with and make your own stuff. There are clearly people who like that, but I would think that the ability to capture people's attention long term is going to be a problem. Just like a good novel there should be some reason to come back and experience it again to experience a story or idea again. If the concept is build your own experience then getting around to returning to it has a much higher re-entry level and that discourages the desire to come back and re-experience something because it was a product of your time and those around you contributing at the time. Basically you can't re-experience it again because it is gone and it is not repeatable. Not everyone likes to re-read a book or watch a movie again, but there is a decent percentage of the population that does. The same is true of games and you will see people talking about going back and playing a favorite game again or a game that resonated with the person. Playing with Legos 6 months or a year later does not have the same experience as when you first played with them.

What you are describing is clearly a lack of design focus and skill. This is the same exact problem a lot of indie titles face and some open source games. They have all this interesting tech ideas in them but there is no game design and game development skill applied to them so they end up as interesting toys for awhile and then get boring quickly because there is no clear design and no clear purpose for the game. This is where an experienced game designer begins to show his worth. An experienced game designer can add that level of focus and consistency that is needed to turn it from a neat/interesting/cute idea into a real game that you want to play over and over again. Some people think a designer doesn't really do all that much other than come up with the basic idea or ideas of a game, and that is not the case as the unfocused nature of Minecraft shows.

Listing this as a Microsoft announcement might be interesting except that most of the work done by the guy was probably when he was working for Novell. He only came to work for Microsoft in Feb. 2011. So not exactly a huge amount of time. Not to mention the modification are supposedly very small ones and are only done in the Microsoft module for their VM, that is still in the staging area from 2+ years ago.

Why we even want Microsoft's VM module I will never understand given Microsoft wants to see Linux rot in hell and never be allowed to surface again. Microsoft as a company calls us a virus that infects everything ruining everything it touches, thieves and intellectual pirates. You should never accept anything from someone actively trying to stab you in the back. When the person is getting behind you it isn't for encouragement but rather so they get a better angle to stab you in the back.

So nothing to see here move along.

Except that completely ignores the issue of Microsoft claiming that Linux violates their patents. I wonder if Microsoft employees and legal counsel for Microsoft has signed off on any patents that might be included in the module work they are doing for their own virtualization to be included in the Linux kernel. You ask me and I see absolutely no point in including Microsoft's module. They have had 2 years and done absolutely nothing with it. All the changes that were done were lots of little ones and the module still isn't ready to leave the staging area. So while the numbers sound interesting and it makes it seem like Microsoft is helping, they are actually doing squat all to get their code into a release and usable format for the Linux kernel.

I still want to know why the Linux kernel should contain anything from a company that constantly assaults the community. A company who calls us thieves and intellectual pirates. Microsoft is going after Android OEMs saying that Linux violates their patents so they have to pay up on licensing fees. Yet Microsoft won't publicly announce what any of those patents are. In fact when Barnes and Noble called BS on Microsoft and refused to sign the NDA. It turned out Microsoft didn't sue over Linux they sued over web browsing and the interface, which is a long long way from Linux itself or even any Linux distribution.

The Linux community should absolutely not accept anything from a company or anyone else who is active trying to put a knife in our back and running around to OEMs who work with the community and black mailing them and telling them sign this NDA so you can see the issues, but you can never tell anyone what they are. That whole thing sounds like BS and Microsoft knows if they are ever announced that the patents will be broken and then Microsoft will be on the hook for all those license payments that they may actually have to pay back.

I want to know why the federal government and the DOJ are not looking in to Microsoft's behavior in this matter given this is exactly the same type of monopoly behavior that Microsoft does and did that got them convicted of being an illegal monopoly in the EU and the US. Microsoft has to play by completely different rules than everyone given the fact they are a company convicted of breaking the law. When you break the law everything is different for you compared to everyone else. So it may be true some other company could do this type of thing without an issue, but we are talking about Microsoft who is a convicted illegal monopoly. So they must play by different rules, and they seem to be breaking those rules and going back to their old illegal ways.

People and companies have said that exact thing many times. Microsoft has complained when they get hit with patent lawsuits and loose. Other companies have said the same thing when hit with patent lawsuits. The problem is the system of patent M.A.D. has been going on so long and the lawyers keep upping the ante to get into the game and keep making the penalties higher and higher for not playing by their rules that it would take major reform of the legal and patent systems to make the kind of changes you are talking about. No lawyer is about to touch that given it would put some legal practices completely out of business and majorly cut in to the legal billable hours for other firms. Lawyers have no interest or incentive to change the system. The companies can't change the system or they risk being nuke and left as smoldering mess on the side of the road. So everyone keeps playing the same stupid game. Eventually something is going to have to give or commerce is going to grind to an extremely slow place because creating a new product or new software will become a complete field landmine of patent violations to try and walk through.