TetsuoShima Posted October 22, 2005 Share Posted October 22, 2005 I think this is "stealing" and that GS should be jailed or fined. I also think it's unpatriotic to steal from other citizens. Am I wrong to think that? troy Okay, lets be clear about this stealing thing that's been going round the forum lately: According to the law, anyone who ever downloaded a single file from the net that was copyrighted or traded a copy (not an original) of any such materials without previous autorisation from the holder of the copyright, is a thief. It does NOT matter whether or not you deleted it afterwards! That means just about anybody on the net these days. So, according to the law, we're all thieves!! Whether or not we ourselves consider ourselves to be thieves or our fellow forum-members/internet users, that is entirely open to the perspective of the members/users in question! I, for one, do not consider someone downloading a copy from the net, that he/she could otherwise not afford, stealing. I do not consider it stealing either, if he/she could afford it, but doesn't want to pay for it because he/she simply finds that the corporation in question charges an unreasonable amount of money for the product. In our minds, stealing is a very relative subject. It is however, not done to accuse anybody on the forum of being a thief (ie. stealing), since the only non-relative source to judge by (the law), considers all of us thieves! Consider that! And don't bring it up again because it can be really hurtfull to hear from a member that he thinks you're a thief, even though you yourself are a thief just as well. If you accuse anybody of anything, first make sure that you are either not guilty of about the same crime, or at least make sure that (if you used to be guilty), you aren't anymore today. Thank you! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
S0V13T Posted October 22, 2005 Share Posted October 22, 2005 treason n 1: a crime that undermines the offender's government 2: disloyalty by virtue of subversive behavior 3: an act of deliberate betrayal Littering, j-walking, shoplifting, downloading © material, and even the act of sodomy is against the law in some places. The law was enacted by governments. Therefore, doing any of these is an act of dileberate betrayal, by virtue of subversive benaviour, and undermining your governemnt. Wether you download one MP3 then delete it immedetelly afterwards, steal one cd and burn it, or download, burn, re-pakage and resell thousands of dvd's a day for profit, you are commiting treason! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kyran Posted October 22, 2005 Share Posted October 22, 2005 i think thats unjust why not vote the government out then there wouldn't be any treason course then there wouldn't be any law and the BIG guy up the road can walk in and walk out with your computer Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Beawulf Posted October 22, 2005 Share Posted October 22, 2005 He'd have to get past 2 boxers and a poodle first ;) I think you have hit the nail on the head tetsuoshima. we are all in the same boat here, noone is in a position to be throwing stones. and just incase I havent used enough cliches: stealing is bad, m'kay Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
StitchInTime Posted October 22, 2005 Share Posted October 22, 2005 Oh, no. Not this topic again. :rolleyes: (Runs and hides under the bed with CD collection.) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
theaveng Posted October 22, 2005 Share Posted October 22, 2005 I never said I wasn't a thief. Of course I am. (duh) I said that what I was doing (watching a tv show, deciding it sucked, and trashing it) was not immoral. In my moral compass, writers don't deserve to get paid for writing shit like andromeda or seaquest Vice-versa, people who write *outstanding* work, like B5 or DS9, deserve to get paid. Again following my moral compass, I should go buy the DVD so they get their just reward. troy Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TetsuoShima Posted October 22, 2005 Author Share Posted October 22, 2005 I never said I wasn't a thief. Of course I am. (duh) I said that what I was doing (watching a tv show, deciding it sucked, and trashing it) was not immoral. In my moral compass, writers don't deserve to get paid for writing #### like andromeda or seaquest Vice-versa, people who write *outstanding* work, like B5 or DS9, deserve to get paid. Again following my moral compass, I should go buy the DVD so they get their just reward. troy Thanks for clearing that up. I can understand and even (up to a certain degree) appreciate that point of view. Even though it is not entirely compatible with mine as you can see from my previous post. Now, maybe it's best if we consider the matter settled and not bring it up again... ;) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
theaveng Posted October 22, 2005 Share Posted October 22, 2005 [1] I, for one, do not consider someone downloading a copy from the net, that he/she could otherwise not afford, stealing. [2] I do not consider it stealing either, if he/she could afford it, but doesn't want to pay for it because he/she simply finds that the corporation in question charges an unreasonable amount of money for the product. In our minds, stealing is a very relative subject. Point #1 sounds reasonable, considering I used to be in the same boat (I copied all my Commodore=64 games when I was a jobless kid), but I disagree with point #2. The $2 to $3 charged per episode of B5 or DS9 or SG1 is not exceesive. That's a reasonable rate considering each episode costs ~$2,000,000 to make. Just curious... how much do you think is a reasonable per-episode rate? troy Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
StitchInTime Posted October 22, 2005 Share Posted October 22, 2005 Now' date=' maybe it's best if we consider the matter settled and not bring it up again... ;)[/quote'] Somehow I get the impression that's not going to happen, but we can only hope that someday, in the fullness of time, when, at long last, we get all our ducks in a row, . . . um . . . we can all fly away? ;) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest c4evap Posted October 22, 2005 Share Posted October 22, 2005 Hmmmm... Writers shouldn't be rewarded for writing crap...interesting idea. What would you do (question goes out to everyone) if your boss decided not to pay you because he thought your work day performance was crap? We've all had bad work days. Food for thought... Oh, and the thief business. Yeah, let's let that die shall we? c4 :thinking: Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TetsuoShima Posted October 22, 2005 Author Share Posted October 22, 2005 I had a feeling you (and probably others as well) would not agree with the second point. The first one is a very reasonable point and most people who do not benefit from you buying the product will agree with that (the ones who do benefit from you buying the product, will 99 chances out of 100 not agree with it).... The second one is much more extreem, a lot of people will not agree with that, but people who have the same life-philosophy as I do usually do agree with that one too (probably some others as well)... A conclusion from my philosophy is (applied to your example), if an episode costs 2 million to produce (that's including the wages and all other costs), you should not expect it to return 2.2 million (10% profit for such a big amount is huge, especially considering that there usually are at least 20 episodes/season). However, if you look at the lifestyle/properties/bank-accounts the producers/companies/actors in the movie-industry have, I say that they make more money than they should, for the work they do. An actor for example who gets half a million dollars for 1 movie, is in my opinion seriously overpayed and from what I see such an amount is not really an exception (at least for most popular movies)... Now, I don't know exactly how much money for example the DS9 crew made, but I do know that Enterprise was cancelled because they were not making enough money. And even more, they were making profit (depends of course on how you see profit), they just weren't making enough of it... That in itself says enough about the entire industry. They don't want to make small bucks, they want to make big bucks and they don't care that in the process they're overpricing their products. They do have very intelligent economists who calculate the optimum pricing for their products, meaning that they won't lower the prices, even if it meant that they would get more people to buy it (and less that download it), simply because they won't get enough extra people who buy the product to justify the drop in pricing (according to these same economists). Even though they will still be making profit at that point! Here is one thing where the free market economy fails us (even though it usually works just fine). Back to your original question: I find 3$ per episode unreasonably high, I also find $1 per single (=music) unreasonably high and 6$ for a movie is also to high. I would however sooner pay $3 for an episode than $1 for a song. 2$ for an episode might be acceptable depending on the show. You should know however that where I live one episode of DS9 costs (on average) a little under $3.5 (rounded to one decimal). One more thing to consider: for just about any relatively succesfull show that's being released on DVD, they have allready paid for the costs of producing it through the broadcast media and for movies through the cinema. The DVD release usually is a bonus as far as income is concerned. I do not say that is allways like this, but it is the norm. Finally I'll explain why the industry does not have any lost income from people who download because of my 2 criteria above: 1. The first group would not have bought the product simply because they could not afford it anyway... So no losses there. 2. The second group would not have bought the product either, because they felt it was too expensive (and I believe that if you want to buy something, but it is in your opinion overpriced and you are true to yourself, you will not buy it)... So, no losses there either... Explanation about the " believe that if you want to buy something, but it is in your opinion overpriced and you are true to yourself, you will not buy it": If you do buy it when you feel it is overpriced, then this means that is evidently was not overpriced since you did buy it, in other words, this person is wrong to think that the product is overpriced, since he/she appearently did feel that it was worth the money, so not overpriced... :) end-note: I classify myself under the first group of people (I couldn't afford it even if I wanted to), but if I could, I'd probably still not buy them (unless I was really loaded with cash). Oh, sorry, this brings me to another remark, most files from the net have a degraded quality compared to the original. Now don't get me wrong, they usually still look very nice, but not as nice as the originals (for things released on dvd that is, wouldn't know about tv-rips since I normally wouldn't have seen the originals and don't know their quality), so there really is an added value to the original dvd-sets, even then I bet a lot of people are not willing to pay the surplus for that, simply because it's too expensive. And another thing (jeez I can just keep on going), the extra the actors/writers get per sold dvd is not really a lot, but still compare: A man goes to work, makes/designs a few tv sets for his boss (along with co-workers of course), he gets paid for that a certain amount, either per hour or per month or even per year. Does he get paid for every tv-set his boss sels, no! So this again is also an extra for the actors/writers. Now, I know why this sytem was originally invented, but those reasons certainly do not apply to any of the actors in any of the well known series/movies... End note (again): I don't mind and can't blame anybody for ripping off the people who are trying to rip us off. Sorry for the long and not very well organized bunch of toughts... EDIT: relocated to Mirror universe Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bbbb Posted October 24, 2005 Share Posted October 24, 2005 I never said I wasn't a thief. Of course I am. (duh) I said that what I was doing (watching a tv show, deciding it sucked, and trashing it) was not immoral. In my moral compass, writers don't deserve to get paid for writing #### like andromeda or seaquest Vice-versa, people who write *outstanding* work, like B5 or DS9, deserve to get paid. Again following my moral compass, I should go buy the DVD so they get their just reward. troy I heard of a copy of the DVD Andromeda season 1 is being sold at Walmart for $4. I'm sure its gone now but yikes, what an awful series compared to Star Trek or Star Wars, fight Yoda, fight! I agree that torrent downloading is not wrong as long as it isn't new (ie. Star Wars Episode III) or the upcoming Battlefront II. I bought Battlefront I and I'm glad I did because although there are some parts I don't like, it was worth the buy, unlike Flight Simulator 2004-don't buy it, better to download it. It's buggy at the best of times. If you want to fly there is no substitute to the real thing. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
species8472 Posted October 24, 2005 Share Posted October 24, 2005 I'm not 100% this will be right along this same topic, but a couple of points that I'd like to raise seem to be along these lines... I do not, nor do I wish to, pay for cable television. Except for some sci-fi, I don't like 95% of what is on TV. Leaving aside the logic of putting advertisements on a medium that I need to pay for in the first place, I only watch airwave television. I have the added disadvantage of being in Montreal, QC, Canada, where most of the local programming is in French, and of the little there is left a Star Trek show is not among the offerings. My own view is that I should not need to pay for shows that I would have diligently recorded on my VCR when aired on regular airwaves had my locality not prevented my receiving them in the first place. And I also very much agree that most of Hollywood (and most corporations in general) pay their higher ranks way too much, but this Canadian boy will leave the planting the seeds of a socialist revolution in the US for another day on another forum... B) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
psheldrake1 Posted October 27, 2005 Share Posted October 27, 2005 Stealing? I'm just borrowing for good Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GorunNova Posted October 27, 2005 Share Posted October 27, 2005 Hmmm... too bad the maxim, "is stealing from a thief wrong?" doesn't really apply when the thief is a large corporation... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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