You know, that is a very logical and smart comment.

I see criminal cases on a daily basis, given my line of work, and you see people getting billed shit-tons of money for a conviction of something awful, but no jail time.

Let's reverse this and try "x Company must prove that the amount they are suing for must be equal or less than the amount of money (SANS legal expenses) that they lost if this individual is guilty. If they cannot prove with 100% iron-clad evidence that the individual being sued performed the act of downloading and sharing their product, and that this sharing actually caused the company to lose sales without any shadow of doubt, the company will lose the amount of the suit multiplied by 1000 as punitive damages to the court and the individual sued. Now go and pick your individual lawsuit candidates well, oh x Company. The future of your paid home groundskeeping costs are on the line.

It got them modded up. Now that's relevance! Psh.

I think you're failing to take into account that "copy" does not define an act as a one-to-many relationship. Copy can be a one-to-one act, but the ending act can be replicated many times. I believe that's called a "branch" relationship or in certain cases a "chain reaction".

What the idiot (and I do mean IDIOT) **AA individuals and their paid minions cover up (if they have the intelligence to even realize it in the first place) is the root point of a copy is not the source of the problem. If there is a problem, it is with each copy act that takes place. It's kind of hard to sue every damned sub copier of material even though it looks like they are beginning to try this with the ISP 6-strikes relationships. Hell, individual suits for individual copies would be suing 12 million people for $10 plus damages. They know the courts would refuse to execute on this, and with certain news articles, it looks like some are just now getting to that point.

I'm not a mathematical expert in any sense, but I do have a very good overall visual-spatial mental processing ability. I try to make the comparison to the "lost profit dollars (and I am not talking about made up shit numbers with projections and other crap nouns, pronouns, adjectives, and verbs tied to it, but ACTUAL HARD NUMBERS) and the amount of money the corporations spend on adaptation, suits, research, punishments, bad flack and its future definitions of assholishness, etc. I look at both of those and do a simple weight in my brain and the loss is astounding in terms of fighting.

It's not anywhere near the level of intelligence we refer to as "rocket science" to understand that there are two simple concepts that have been PROVEN over time with actual death, destruction, multiplication, success, and joy:

1. When you tell people it's wrong to do something that doesn't HARM another person (but it's just defined as "wrong"), it causes people to want to do it more (and Hell, even find more creative ways of doing it just to show you what an idiot you are for trying to stop the processes).

2. When you create something that is awesome that people benefit from but it's too much work to just "do it yourself", they pay and keep paying but complain about it unless new stuff comes out to spice it up a bit.

**AA refuses to evolve or can't afford to. Given their profit margins and the lifestyles of the C*Os, they just refuse to evolve. They want to pull in assloads of money without hardly doing any thinking or work, like they used to do back in the 20th century. It was easy to give a percentage to individuals and groups (bands etc) to make them feel and act rich'n'famous while still pocketing over 200,000% of the money those rich famous people were getting. Now you have to create drama to keep things from being truly repetitive, but coming up with new things that change the industry takes too much weekly vacation money from too many top-level C*Os for a year to justify it.

Let's clear the air and speak honestly to one another (the Industry and the people)...

This is almost just like evolutionary battle. Things have evolved and it is VERY easy to reproduce or copy audio-visual material now. This supposedly causes potential harm or death to one of the parties. It fights back by trying to overrun the other party. Both parties will NOT back down. What happens in evolution when two forms of life are fighting with one another for resources/etc and both don't back down? Usually (and by usually I mean ALWAYS) one party finds a way to adapt before the other. The one that adapts more quickly has the upper hand and the other will die off or adapt with a huge reduction in population.

Saying "Don't copy" is a simple thing - you don't do it or you do it. The party that does refuses to stop.

Saying "We encourage you to adapt with cooler things that encourage us to give you money" is something that seems to drive the other party to continually try and repeat historical processes with a bit of a shift and a lot of fear mongering.

It's interesting how the party that can and SHOULD adapt won't do it because they want to prove they have the longest Johnsons. The other party can easily destroy the Industry by stopping sales. The more the Industry fights the people, the more people realize that they are being attacked and want to defend themselves. Once the line has been crossed, there is only ONE loser possible, and that is the Industry.

It appears that they're trying to get everything that they can before they either adapt or die (as an entity). That or they are literally too stupid to realize the basics of life right in front of their faces. I guess that's possible because they're "on a Mission" now. Once you've started your Mission, rarely do you realize and admit that your actions are ensured to fail and change your M.O.

The Industry is on a Mission, and its end is either a peace agreement (in this case, new awesome material that people want to pay for) or self-destruction. I am just amused to watch it every day. I hope either end is reached in my lifetime so I can smile and either admit that Humans do have the ability and desire to adapt or that Human intelligence is nothing but white noise in the grand scheme of life. Either way is a smile. :)

They measure in a volcanic area and report raised CO2 levels? Naaaah.. GET OUTTA HERE. Pull the other one.

Amen to that. I can't wait for Anonymous to get their hands on Apple's Master Key.

Humorous side note; if the stealing of the master key didn't apply legally, I can next see little strip mall and hole-in-the-wall joints popping up everywhere with ads to "Spy on your lover's life" or "Get what is rightfully yours". Heh.

"You're living in a world of make-believe with flowers and bells and leprechauns and magic frogs with funny little hats."

- Homer Simpson

Guess he needs some money. Who knows where it will suddenly spring up from? Oh, my! The suspense!!

He killed it, but now we can't investigate because we have no access to the critical data! Rats! RATS!

But but but... This one will revolutionize the world...... inside a person's head..... for a couple of seconds...... while they're trying to figure out its relevance and get a headache hey wait where's the ice cream and hard liquor?

That's totally worth destroying the soil, right? /sarcasm

Oh, come on that's totally inappropriate.

You torrent that stuff at the office.

Let's test it to find out. Just make sure the hosts file name has .iso at the end.

Are you torrenting any?

*snerk*

Oh, so THAT'S why Slashdot has a moderation unit called "Funny". NOW I get it!

(r)egistered AWESOME!