As for the "mother's operation" scenario: I doubt Google cares whether someone was trying to pay for their mother's operation or their own drug habit. Nor should they! If I were Google, I would not want infringing content on my store, no matter what the reason. I would feel no qualms about banning someone who tried selling Angry Birds because they needed to pay their mom's medical bills..

Your whole argument makes no sense. How would punishing infringement ever encourage people to infringe more? How would it "punish the partially or potentially developers much more than the wholesale infringers?" You make a lot of blanket statements, but say absolutely nothing to back them up.

Google's best move is to get rid of as much infringing content as possible. You could make the case that if an aspect of a game (or even the main subject of the game) is infringing, then Google should be judicious in assessing the situation. For games that are straight-up copies, however — as in, if the game is a straight-up pirated version that's been uploaded as the infringer's original work — then an auto-ban is not at all out of the question.

And FYI, the reason this is different from Google Video, YouTube, Google Docs, etc, is that here people are making money from infringement. It's a whole different ballgame.

That's not an excuse. Like others have said, if you rob a bank to pay for your mother's operation, you still go to jail.

Not the right way to get the other developer to respect your IP rights. Complain to Google and get the game taken down, don't just submit it again.

Yes you do. "Cheating to test the waters" is a cop-out. Some of us write legitimate software to test the waters.

That makes no sense at all.

What were you saying about morons?

No.

"Clear conjecture?" Surely you jest. Unless you've made an enormous breakthrough in networking technology, all existing network interfaces can only handle a finite amount of information at once.

From the Wall Street Journal:

Wow, that sure sounds like they're denying that congestion is an issue!

As for U-verse, it's not primarily an on-demand service—its competitors are cable television providers, whom AT&T has no power to cap, not services like Hulu and Netflix.

[citation needed]

If only there were some sort of "cap" to prevent and/or discourage people from overusing bandwidth and taxing the network...

To be clear, I would rather they improve the infrastructure than impose any sort of limits, but I would be perfectly happy if they would plainly state their (currently invisible) caps. If I pay for an unlimited amount of something, I expect to be given an unlimited amount of it. If I pay for 150GB, I expect to be given 150GB.

I fail to see the problem here.

So the monitoring tool that accompanies a not-yet-rolled-out service hasn't yet been rolled out? That's almost crazy enough to make perfect sense!

Just because it hasn't yet been released doesn't mean you get to slap a vaporware label on it.

Uh huh. So they're not capping their U-Verse TV, but it's not on-demand. It's competing with things like actual digital cable, which is unaffected by the caps, so... the caps themselves don't provide an incentive to use that over a competing service.

Uh, at any given time there is a finite amount of bandwidth. Obviously you can't have a reserve of it, but that doesn't mean there's an infinite amount.

Now, how could bandwidth caps possibly affect usage? Maybe by incentivizing people to more conservative with their Internet usage? If Bob AT&T Subscriber sees that he can only use X amount of data, he'll use the Internet more conservatively. You're kidding yourself if you think that nobody will make the decision to conserve during peak hours.

Truth-in-advertising like... actually telling people the cap, rather than saying they give you "unlimited" whatever and then cutting you off when you hit an invisible cap?

Investing in infrastructure is all well and good, but just throwing hardware at the problem is not a scalable solution. You'll end up with a situation where the massive number of users makes it prohibitively expensive. Come up with a real way to reduce network congestion, or stop acting like a spoiled child. You're not fucking entitled to unlimited Internet access for a flat fee.

Maybe they STILL advertise it as unlimited because they STILL haven't rolled out the caps.

Sorry, buddy.

What would the solution to this be? A variable cap that changes based on how busy the network is?

FTFA:

So they're absolutely providing a way to check usage. The jury's out on whether or not it's a "good" way, but seeing as you haven't used it you are in no way capable of making that judgement.

Now you're just making things up. It doesn't mention that anywhere in the article.

There is a finite amount of bandwidth. The options that have been presented to solve this problem are traffic shaping and capping, so please either throw your towel in with one of those or propose another idea.

How is this bad for the consumer? It seems to me that this is better than the old business model of "promise consumers unlimited broadband service, and then shape traffic when we need to manage the network because we can't actually provide it." That's the whole reason traffic shaping is bad: ISPs are messing around with my traffic in order to improve performance for other customers, when according to their plans and advertising they should have the capacity for me to do whatever I want without needing to degrade my performance.

Bandwidth has a finite capacity. To deal with that, ISPs have introduced traffic shaping and caps. You can disagree with one or the other, but if you're complaining about both it sounds like you just feel entitled to everything.

Uh, what? I don't really get your analogy with volume. Just as the First Amendment prevents the government from stopping or hindering someone from saying something (legal), net neutrality prevents ISPs from blocking or throttling traffic.

You need to re-read the Constitution, and the definition of net neutrality. Net neutrality has nothing to do with regulating speech.

Ha! Hahahaha. Surely you jest, bonch. Not only can examples be found in abundance, but there's a nice fat juicy one in TFA—and straight from the president of an ISP, no less!

That is it in a nutshell.

Also, let's rid ourselves of this false notion that "ISPs run their own private networks." Who paid for these networks? The government. Who owns the land under these cables and towers? The government. It is a specious claim to say that the ISPs' networks are "their own."

I think that about sums it up.

That's what happened in my high school — the school IT people would store the administrator password on sticky notes. Inevitably one fell off in the hallway, and my friends and I found it, and decided to pull a few pranks.

The administration and IT people got really pissed and changed the password. Which, of course, we found a few days later sitting on a sticky note in the hall...

It's really more sad than funny, actually, because not only did the IT people use the same administrator password everywhere, our school actually served as the ISP/host for a lot of municipal services around our county, including the police department.

I am "free" to implement either codec, no one can stop me. The issue is that with H.264 if I plan to distribute that implementation I must pay license fees to the patent holders.

Both codecs are free in different ways. WebM is gratis; free as in beer; it costs no money to implement and distribute, but not to contribute to. H.264 is libre; free as in speech; you must pay to distribute an implementation, but anyone can contribute to the spec.

Like I said, I think the ability to contribute the codec vastly outweighs the ability to implement it for free.