hkmwbz's Journal: Entertainment industry shills on Slashdot?

Paranoid mini-rant of the day:

After someone posted a comment about how copyright infringement is "stealing", another person and myself both posted a brief comment that it isn't - it is actually copyright infringement. For some reason, both of us were modded down to -1 (I posted without a karma bonus). (And how can a comment with the rating 0 be overrated anyway?)

I've noticed a lot of these things on Slashdot lately. Posts blatantly lying to make Microsoft look better and being modded up. Post with perfectly valid criticisms of Microsoft being modded down. Posts promoting heavy penalties for "music pirates" being modded up. Posts arguing that the punishment shouldn't be excessive compared to the crime being modded down. And so on.

What's this all about anyway? Are industry shills flooding Slashdot?

Bleh.

[Splintax]

I wish people would stop bitching about 'copyright infringement' over 'stealing' [msn.com]. Big fucking deal.

Re:Bleh.

[hkmwbz]

"I wish people would stop bitching about 'copyright infringement' over 'stealing'. Big fucking deal."

Yes, let's just ignore facts. Let's just call everything "stealing". Murder is stealing. You are "stealing" someone's life, aren't you?

Why bother having different laws for different crimes at all? Let's just call all of it "theft".

"the fact is that for all intensive purposes copyright infringement = 'downloading movies' = piracy = stealing = ILLEGAL."

The fact is that just because you think it's c

Re:Bleh.

[Splintax]

Copyright infringement is totally different from theft, and that's a fact.

I agree with you. However, I get tired of people continually pointing this out. ("First, you're wrong because you said stealing instead of copyright infringement. You're also wrong because.. well, you're just wrong.")

I just think that time could be better spent than continually debating the semantics of a word just because some organization used it in an advertising campaign, and address the real issues.

Re:Bleh.

[ScentCone]

Copyright infringement is totally different from theft, and that's a fact

I've always noticed that the louder someone shouts this, the quieter they are about the fact that copyright infringement is still wrong.

In other words, the people who know they can't defend the blatant ripping off of the artists they say they like, try to distract, instead, by splitting hairs over just what type of ripping off it actually is. Who cares? The point is that it's incredible hypocisy to say you like someone's music, b

Re:Bleh.

[hkmwbz]

Theft? Murder? So what? Would that change the nature of the conversation one bit?

Re:Bleh.

[ScentCone]

Theft? Murder? So what? Would that change the nature of the conversation one bit?

Sure, because those have nothing to do with the actual topic being discussed. I'm not saying there's no (legal) difference between ripping off an artist (and a retailers) by walking into a store and stealing a physical CD and ripping off an artist (and the related entities which that artist has chosen to handle business dealings) and "making" a copy of a CD that someone else got, from someone, from someone else a thousand ti

Hah!

[cavemanf16]

An interesting observation, especially given Slashdot's recent apparent revocation of Mod points. (Notice how most stories have 0 or just a few posts over a score of '4'.) I wonder if Slashdot is 1) getting trolled so bad by corporate schills that it had to highly restrict the moderation system temporarily, or 2) is itself becoming a corporate schill and is being "requested" to be more generous with it's schilling. After all, they already post dupe's like it's nobody's business and love to flirt with Roland