People who are well trained, and have a decent salary tend to take their job more seriously, mainly because the downsides of losing it are much higher. If you hate your job, you have no idea what you are doing, and you earn minimum wage, why would you care if you got fired for browsing through someone's hard drive? But if you have a decent job with prospects, benefits yada yada, you won't be so happy to take risks with your career.

People *say* they want to compensate the artists. But what percentage of them send the $ direct to the artist by paypal when they torrent an album? What percentage even tried to find a way to pay the artist?
0.001%? or less?

I do not know a single person making copyrighted works who has ever, at any point in their career ever been sent a single cent by a pirate who wanted to 'cut out the middle man'.
Its just words.

what if we actually paid for music?
Just an idea

you are still using an O/S from 1980 then eh?
Problems get fixed over time, performance gets improved, bugs get patched.
This is not news.

How does this prevent you from starting a band in your garage and promoting it through the net?
does the RIAA control the tubes?

You know what, I couldn't care a fuck. because I like their music, so I buy it, I don't get prosecuetd or sent letters about it, and their CDs have no DRM (I know because I rip them to my ipod on purchase day).
So why the fuck should I care?

Both, but sensibly they tend to go after uploaders. But if you are in the US, downloading copyrighted material is quite clearly against the law, even though people on forums might love to perpetuate the myth that it's not. It's like the idea that you can't get pregnant the first time you have sex. People want to believe it, but it isn't true :D

what?
You realise the internet is free and that anyone can get an account on myspace or facebook right?
There is no evil cabal of cackling minions that stop people making decent music. If the RIAA were blown into dust TODAY, no 'new' music would get made that is not already getting made.
There arent great new indie bands sat there on their awesome songs who have pledged not to release them until the RIAA have died.
Maybe you just don't like modern music? Join the club, but it's silly to blame this on the RIAA. You are free to seek out indie bands right now.

I say this as someone who used to be in a band, back in the day that never got signed. We didn't have 1% of the opportunities then that modern unsigned indie bands have now.
The RIAA promote a lot of souless crap that I hate as much as anyone, but they don't actually STOP me buying the new album by my fave band (Dream Theater). They might not promote them or market them, but there is nothing the RIAA can do to prevent indie bands doing well.

Indeed. but her fine was $1,500 as I recall, and she refused to settle for it.
That was her mistake.

No I wouldn't, if I was clearly and obviously guilty. I've been given a speeding fine before. I was speeding. There were a ton of mitigating factors, but at the end of the day, I was speeding, so I paid the fine. I could have wasted a year of my life arguing in court, but I have a life to get on with, and I knew I'd broken the law.
Somehow jammie believes her own hype and somehow convinced herself she is innocent.

maybe because the plumber got pauid when he did the work, and the IP creator did not?
Please tell me you don't advocate such laughably silly systems as patronage for video games and music?

I for one do not want to only play games and hear music funded by the idle rich.

yes it does.
unfortanately, *everything* cant be copied and shared at will, just digital content
If people who make digital content still need real world food and rent, then they need to be paid in a conventional sense so they can afford that food and rent.
Wake me up when star trek replicators exist. Until then, the argument that 'everything can be copied and shared' is not true and irrlevant.

part of gmails phishing filter seems to do this

if(hyperlink in email ends in .exe)
{
    isphishing = true.
}

Even if this is an email from someone in your whitelist and is merely quoting text from your own message you sent them.
And there seems to be NO way to prevent a message with .exe in it to be marked this way :(

I couldn't agree more. Copyright law needs updating, but abolishing it is silly.
I hate the RIAA and MPAA, not becauase of their policies regarding court cases or anything they do to people who are filesharing, but because their stance devalues the true justifications for copyright, and because they make me watch unskippable warnings on DVDs.

Most people who benefit from copyright hate the MPAA and RIAA. I'm sick of being called an RIAA shill just because I don't believe in decriminalising file-sharing.

There is a whole spectrum of views on copyright. The RIAA are the Klu Klux Klan of copyright debate. Do not lump us all in with them, and we will not lump in all copyright reformers with Peter Sunde and his fellow recently-sold-out friends.

"The videogames business is defined by technology"

Really? I've only been playing games since pong, and worked in them for 10 years, but stupidly I've been defining the videogames business by 'fun'.
It's a pity this has ended up a minority viewpoint.