Well then we just have to get the word out that if this starts happening, you don't settle. You're far more likely to have the amount reduced to a reasonable level. I know I for one will be hounding the ministries responsible for this bill about intervening if this shit starts going down.

"Slimeballs" like Kim Dotcom are the only ones who can drag these people into the limelight. Like it or not, your rights are defined by the precedent set in cases involving duplicitous people. It's easy to say "Oh well he's obviously guilty, so in this case it's okay to violate his rights to get the correct result." Problem is, that is one slippery-ass slope you're heading down.

Also, the copyright bill recently passed, though it has terrible digital lock provisions, does actually differentiate between commercial and non-commercial infringement and caps the latter at $5000 for all infringement up to the point the lawsuit was filed. Also also, that section of the bill contains explicit instructions to judges for considering statutory damage amounts to take into account the nature of the infringement and how widely it was used, and they can drop it as low as $100. That's not even worth the costs of filing the suit. This severely limits the likelihood that people will cop to settlements for thousands of dollars to avoid a trial. There are some silver linings.

Wrong. It's $5000 for all infringement up to the point the lawsuit is filed. At the very least, there won't be any Canadian Joel Tenenbaums. It will be far less worthwhile to actually pursue these cases here.

It's important to note that the cap of $5000 is for all infringement up to the point the lawsuit is filed. Not $5000 per infringement. And even then, the new bill C-11 contains instructions to judges on determining statutory damages to consider the personal nature of the infringement and how much it actually damaged the plaintiff. That $5000 judgment could go all the way down to $100. You won't be seeing any "$2 million for downloading two dozen songs" bullshit, so that's something.

This. You literally just sent a man to jail and ruined his entire career because he hit the wrong button. In what universe is this considered okay?

Yes, but who is number 1?

Yes. No patents. The Renaissance was one of the greatest periods of human creativity and invention in recorded history, and it happened entirely without the creation of laws surrounding the restriction of ideas. There was innovation and art before there was ever the idea of "intellectual property". The system would evolve to be drastically different, no doubt, but it would continue to exist without IP. No, I don't have any hard evidence for this, because nobody in the modern world has tried getting rid of it yet. This is all anecdotal, but there is zero doubt in my mind that the human race as a whole would be better off if IP never existed.

Here in Toronto, you just described the TTC. I have a younger brother and a friend of my father-in-law in there who both said the same thing.

Rotten Tomatoes uses a different system though. In fact, I really like their system. They look at a review and decide ultimately whether the critic enjoyed the movie enough to recommend it or not. It's like Siskel & Ebert's thumbs up or down system; fresh or rotten. The only factor is whether the enjoyed the movie or not. There's none of this trying to take a letter grade and turn it into a number from 1-100 bullshit. The Rotten Tomatoes rating is simply a percentage of the number of critics who liked the film enough to recommend it out of the total number of reviews, which I find much more useful. It's still no substitute for the most reliable method, which somebody else above mentioned: find a reviewer whose taste agrees with you on past films/games/whatever and see what they say about new ones. Rotten Tomatoes takes less time though.

Ack, replying to this to fix a misclick mod. But you are absolutely correct. The medium of the message makes a big difference in what people will tolerate.

It took four years because the people who could actually do it weren't trying. Once Sony started being dicks about removing OtherOS, they dove in head first. It took about 12 months from that point, which is par for the course with the 360. And when it was finally cracked, it was cracked hard. They got the private key for signing executable code.

It's adherence to web standards does not make a (admittedly hyperbolic) statement about its relative popularity untrue.

Maybe, but Dance Central is easily the best thing on Kinect and got great professional reviews. Just Dance isn't half bad either, but inferior to Harmonix's offering IMO. I think it's a little unfair to say such reviewers just don't like these kinds of games. They may just not be very good.

We don't have any problem with the "true believers" either, until they start trying to teach religion as science and bury factual scientific evidence. That is when the shit hits the fan.