GamePolitics has extensive coverage on the aftermath of this past week's Federal raids on suspected modchippers. There were numerous negative reactions to the action here on the site, and your comments were not alone. Many commenters at the site Dvorak Uncensored expressed similar frustration and disbelief at the federal government's priorities. As stated on the site's original post: "Are you kidding me? With drug dealers everywhere, murder, porous borders, terrorism the Feds are concerned about game mods?? Holy crap. Next I supposed they will be cracking heads over unlocked phones. Great." Meanwhile, one of the raided men is now without any electronics whatsoever as a result of the search and seizure, and feeling very much alone. Another man has (more seriously) been barred from seeing his girlfriend and daughter, and has been reduced to sleeping in his car. As he puts it: "I would like to formally thank Microsoft and Nintendo for cracking down on the little guy with a soldering iron in his garage, rather than going after the people that are responsible for the bootlegs being available."
> With drug dealers everywhere, murder, porous borders, terrorism the Feds are concerned about game mods?? Holy crap. Next I supposed they will be > cracking heads over unlocked phones. Great." There's nothing immoral about selling drugs (unless you think we should ban alcohol and tobacco, or that we've criminalised the right drugs and that growing, selling, buying and consuming cannabis somehow requires punishment), but making it possible for people to trivially pirate software is an area I believe to
There's nothing immoral about selling drugs (unless you think we should ban alcohol and tobacco, or that we've criminalised the right drugs and that growing, selling, buying and consuming cannabis somehow requires punishment), but making it possible for people to trivially pirate software is an area I believe to be a little more grey. Also, as someone who's recently been burgled and had his phone stolen, if by `unlocking` phones you're talking about changing the IMEI number so that stolen phones can be reus
0-0=0
Just because you download something does not in any way, shape, or form mean you were likely to buy it. Now, it is true that there will be a percentage of people who would otherwise have bought an album, but that percentage is, quite honestly, probably no more than 10% of people who download 50% or more of said album. And except for the "elite" pushed upon the masses by the record labels, the vast majority of artists will experience a large enough gain in listenership that the people who do buy the al
Why is stealing from "a large company" any better than stealing from a family or small company?
Its plain as day that stealing the rent/food/medicine money from a fixed income senior causes more harm than taking the same amount from a wealthy multinational corporation. Surely anyone can see that.
That doesn't make stealing from wealthy corporations ok, but from a harm perspective there is an obvious difference.
I have no sympathy for anyone claiming they had to steal for food. That's a bullshit excuse to just
So no, it's not obvious to me that stealing from an individual is worse than stealing from a corporation.
Take 100,000 people; lets for the sake of argument suppose that they are all poor fixed income seniors living off dividend cheques from the corporation they own equal shares in.
Now, steal $1000 from one of those individuals; suddenly he can't pay his rent, or buy food, or refill a prescription. His best chance is to take out a loan, and try to pay it back $100 month over the next year; which would make a
"If you want an unlocked phone, maybe you should.... well, I don't know. Maybe buy a fucking phone that is not fucking locked."
The cell carriers justify selling locked phones by saying that the owner needs to be with the company for a certain length of time to "pay back" the subsidized cost of the phone... HOWEVER, they also say that if you cancel the plan early, you have to pay a penalty equal to the amount of the balance of the subsidy. So why can't I have my phone unlocked after I've paid for it, in
Until somebody figures out a way to grind pirated games into a fine powder to be snorted or smoked that causes hallucinations, birth defects, and profuse, acute, addictive behavior Isn't that pretty much how crystal meth is made? There are grades to drugs. I think that if you rank drugs from safest to most dangerous, you'd get something like:
First problem - finding NORMAL people. By this I assume you mean people that aren't immediately addicted or become overly dependent very quickly. The second problem is there are certainly people that can handle drugs but there is a large number of people that cannot. How do you separate them out? The people that will utterly freak out on PCP or LSD. The people that after three doses of coke will do literally anything for the next, including sell their children, rob relatives, etc.
First problem - finding NORMAL people. By this I assume you mean people that aren't immediately addicted or become overly dependent very quickly.
Actually, I meant people who are not criminals, demonized, or marginalized for their choice of chemicals. I think that pharmaceuticals are far far worse than my first two categories (except cigs, maybe). People are completely trusting of their doctors, who are completely trusting of the sponsorship of the drug companies. I'm far, far, far more selective about what I put in my body than most people, even though it includes illegal substances, and things child-drugging alcoholic valium-popping H3-driving soccer moms consider dangerous.
The second problem is there are certainly people that can handle drugs but there is a large number of people that cannot. How do you separate them out? The people that will utterly freak out on PCP or LSD. The people that after three doses of coke will do literally anything for the next, including sell their children, rob relatives, etc.
We could continue as a culture suggesting that people not do drugs. For categories 2 through 4, I'm suggesting at the very least NOT throwing some 19-year old in prison because he was at a low point when someone offered him some coke. I'm suggesting that if someone does acid, he shouldn't have to worry about asking for help if he gets freaked out. I'm not saying people SHOULD do drugs. I will not ever do any of my class 4 drugs. I think that the current system of what is essentially abstinence-only education is bullshit and non-functional. If I had been better-educated about drugs, I wouldn't have called a whole bunch of people the first time I did mushrooms.
I'm merely suggesting that a more permissive society lends itself to children coming to the proper people for answers for difficult questions, rather than having to learn about drugs from drug dealers. Try learning about a Ford from a Ford dealer. Or a computer from a computer salesman (why yes, it DOES play with your balls!).
As far as I know, there isn't a test you can give someone that will say they can handle some drug.
An educated and judicious acid-user (not abuser) can tell if someone will have problems when they take it. Educating people about the drug, again, is the safest plan. I am now very very very educated. After a few bad experiences, I found erowid.org, and it has kept me healthy when I did drugs I was going to do anyway (though I may have taken some of those trips back now), and it kept me safe and sane knowing what was going to happen to me and knowing that I'd done everything I could to keep safe.
Ever seen any of the above behavior? It's not pretty and current laws pretty much prevent them from being confined in any way until they actually do something to harm others.
I have seen my best friend from childhood end up hooked on crystal meth. It was a lack of education, and a lack of hope. The inexistence of support structures, the pressure from land developers to get poor mexicans off their prime golf-course real estate, and finally, him being careless. I went back to Mexico, and he wouldn't smoke weed anymore because it made him feel sick. He smoked with me once, and got sick and lashed out at me so violently that I almost fainted. I tripped with him, pleaded with him, tried to get him to get his motherfucking visa so I could pay for his ticket up to the US so he could get out of his toxic environment. I tried everything short of duct-taping him to a tree. Now, in retrospect, I would have. He had an alcoholic father, and a family that used to ride our asses about weed before we ever smoked, and they were friendly to us when we finally started. His mother ended up fucking his dad's best friend, and his dad moved back to Sinaloa, and he was stuck being the asshole head of family that his two sisters and his mother berated. Nobody gave a fuck about him. So yes, I have seen the problems with drugs, I just don't see where any of the above would have been made any worse by him not being considered a criminal and a piece of shit, and a little bit of straightforward education.
I don't think the end users should be the people gettig in trouble. To use a not so uncommon analogy- this is just like raiding the home of and locking up the crack head that has been spending all his money on a hopeless addiction rather than ging after to SOB that is making tens of thousands of dollars a month supporting addicts addictions and making the illegal substance available in the first place. Think about it-- you make something that normally costs $50-$60 available for free after making some simpl
The DMCA pretty much says that you don't really own hardware anymore. You just allow the manufacturer to store it in your custody, and in exchange you may use it...
"I would like to formally thank Microsoft and Nintendo for cracking down on the little guy with a soldering iron in his garage,..."
As long as people with money have more influence over those who make laws than people without money, the system will continue to represent the interests of those who have money. Look at the rejection of the justice system of allowing people on welfare to object to random searches of their houses; that's a rather large difference from what the US constitution has to say on the matter, but it is done to serve the interests of those who pay taxes against those who lack the ability (for whatever reason) to pay taxes. MPAA and RIAA crackdowns and suing actions (including those against the Swedes in their own country via the US gov't!) are similar reflections of the concept that money is power, not personal choice.
If you wish to not be in a situation where money decides power, move to a country with a representative democracy, where the representatives are purely chosen via 1 vote per 1 person, and where lobbying money is not allowed.
If you wish to not be in a situation where money decides power, move to a country with a representative democracy, where the representatives are purely chosen via 1 vote per 1 person, and where lobbying money is not allowed.
Which country that has soundly rejected crony capitalism [wikipedia.org] is currently taking refugees from the United States crony capitalism regime?
If you wish to not be in a situation where money decides power, move to a country with a representative democracy, where the representatives are purely chosen via 1 vote per 1 person, and where lobbying money is not allowed.
And which country would this be? And when will the US invade it for 'harboring/training/aiding/abetting terrorists'?
How about the United Kingdom?
What you call "the lobby system", we call "cash for questions" and it is a crime.
Most recently, where there was any question that money may have bought political favours (the cash-for-honours scandal), the police pulled in Tony Blair and half his cabinet for questioning under oath.
Sadly, I think many Americans could not even imagine the police questioning Bush over the Rove affair, or misrepresenting facts to the UN, or any of the many other scandals I find it difficult to ke
No thanks. I would rather not move to a country that has 4 security cameras for every person. Heck you guys are even adding capabilities that allow the cameras to talk back [dailymail.co.uk]. It just seems a bit Orwellian...
Good god. No crime was committed in the "Rove Affair",better known as the Plame Affair, although there was the travesty of sending a staff official to jail over not remembering the exact fucking date of a, to him, relatively unimportant phone call that occurred at least 8-16 months ago(Don't know exact span of time). End of discussion, unless all of you assholes suddenly have eidetic memories.
Look at the rejection of the justice system of allowing people on welfare to object to random searches of their houses; that's a rather large difference from what the US constitution has to say on the matter, but it is done to serve the interests of those who pay taxes against those who lack the ability (for whatever reason) to pay taxes.
Not having a clue what you were referring to, I started doing some research. I assume you mean the decision by the 9th Circuit by 2-1 split and denied en banc hearing of th
As long as people with money have more influence over those who make laws than people without money, the system will continue to represent the interests of those who have money.
I'll take it as a safe bet that owning an XBox 360 or PS3 makes you are one of the people who have money. Especially if you are willing to chance taking a soldering iron to a $400 appliance.
But neither would I be be surprised to learn that your mutual fund or 401(K) retirement plan has substantial investments in Microsoft, Sony, an
Feds must love going after suspects of crimes related to technology; they can justify seizing everything the person has for the flimsiest reason. If they're lucky, they even get to auction off the lot.
And why the hell are modchips illegal? If someone's committing sizable copyright infringement, you can already nail them for something. You don't need a redundant law that criminalizes the guy who wanted to see if his X-Box could run Linux.
It's my hardware, I can plug whatever I want into it. I can have other people do this for me. It is my hardware, I can use it as a doorstop, I can flush it down the toilet, I can light it on fire. The companies may be able to entitle themselves to software restrictions (DMCA encryption laws etc.), but when you come right down to it its just a hunk of metal and silicon.
If the guy in the article was really just installing modchips, then I don't see why this warrents ANY law enforcement actiSDFwesfwefwe *NO
There is copyright law. There is patent law. There is trademark law. There is trade secret law. The letter of the law in the United States does not recognize these four areas of law as some sort of monolithic "intellectual property" regime. They remain separate, and for a good reason: they are more different than similar [fsf.org] in rationale, in scope, and in duration.
"Are you kidding me? With drug dealers everywhere, murder, porous borders, terrorism the Feds are concerned about game mods?? Holy crap. Next I supposed they will be cracking heads over unlocked phones. Great."
Because people can't be concerned about more than one thing at once. While I can sympathize with the thought behind this, the argument "they shouldn't enforce crime X until they've completely eradicated crime Y" is a ridiculous one.
Give me a break, actually go to the inner city sometime and see how "rampant" the crime is. And do you think any crime that does happen is because the police were raiding mod chippers? You're probably just another middle-class, suburban slashdotter who thinks watching cop shows gives him insight into the "streets".
It's all about priorities you shithead. Copyright infringement is a civil matter. Can't you understand that?
Go read what I wrote again, this time read every word you illiterate cretin. I
There is something seriously wrong here. I'm not sure that no wrong was done, but I'm also sure that there were better things Federal Agents could have been doing.
I'm not really a gamer, but I have to say using an original XBox (cheaply acquired, second hand, pawn, etc) as a network media front end for something like MythTV [mythtv.org] is pretty awesome... This isn't really possible without modifcations. I'm not interested in playing games.. but what I am interested in is a cheap media center box with decent TV out capability. That is one Really Awesome, Non-Infringing use.
I don't really think any of the analogies fit, either. It is what it is, which is not necessarily used for game piracy (though probably is some significant percentage of the time). On the one hand you can say it is like installing feature X in your car to get more horsepower. Well, that'll make your car go faster... which is potentially illegal. I mean your stock Geo is perfectly capable of moving along at any set speed limit.. so any modification to go faster is intended to break the speed limit.... It doesn't really fit either, but I would bet the situation could have been solved with a conversation, perhaps an interview at the station, etc.
However, that would require an intelligent and thoughtful analysis of the situation: the parties involved, the scope and scale of the crime, etc. Apparently the folks in charge here here were either intellectually incapable of that or Conditioned to Obey(tm). Either way it is scary, and that is probably the intention.
I feel sorry for the folks involved. Probably, on the whole, just nerds like us in the wrong place at the wrong time. One looses one's stuff for an inexcusably long time and one is presumed guilty. If one is lucky one gets to be a media poster child on some scale about the "Dangers of XYZ". I would hope these folks can truly get a trial with a jury of their peers AND that the judge doesn't force the omission of "irrelevant facts" like "there were no pirated games found at the home". I would love to see this type of thing crushed by Jury Nullification. (If you ever want out of Jury Duty go up to the prosecutor, lean in, and whisper 'I know all About Jury Nullification [wikipedia.org]').
Consider the BS one has to go through for simple things involving the government such as DMV tag renewals, tickets for various minor offenses, property tax, etc and then consider the crap these folks will have to endure, probably for years, over a mod chip. This is dumb.
Things like having everything taken away from you is good publicity for those who wish to prevent an action. Why pirate software if you might go bankrupt for doing so. Is it worth risking your family to play a game? Is it worth doing drugs if you can lose everything?
So these stories play right into the hands of people who push these kinds of actions. Detainment and confiscation without due process is a very powerful method of enforcing will upon the masses. Stories such as this allow those who wish to oppress to succeed.
What is unfortunate is that we fight fear with fear. We think laws are unjust because it causes those who break the laws to suffer. This method of fighting injustice does not work because sometimes in order to enforce a law people must suffer.
So why do not have the courage to fight from basic principles. We cannot take a persons stuff away without a conviction of a crime by his peers. We cannot take a persons freedom without probable cause and timely due process. We cannot say that person is a witch, and then kill them knowing full well no jury will convict us. At least in the US, we were founded on the principle that we have inherent rights, and that those rights were given to us by our creator, though it seems that some people believe, especially in the US administration, only Americans were given those rights, or perhaps they do not believe in a creator, even though in their cowardice they claim to.
I think that some people want it all. They are cowards who are perfectly happy to have others suffer without due process, but when it happens to them they whine to the media. Get used to it. The congress is afraid of being called traitors, that they are further increasing the power of the government to take whatever they wish from the people without due process. This little mod chip thing is small potatoes, and meaningless. The power was given freely by the republican representatives of the people.
"Are you kidding me? With drug dealers everywhere, murder, porous borders, terrorism the Feds are concerned about game mods?? Holy crap. Next I supposed they will be cracking heads over unlocked phones. Great."
ICE - US Customs and Immigration Enforcement - employs 15,00.
CPB - US Customs and Border Protection - Including Border Patrol - 44,000
Law enforcement has the resources to multi-task. The FBI alone has a budget of $6 billion. "Getting your priorites straight" does not reqiure handing out a lifetime
I don't happen to have a modchip to allow me to play backups, but that's because I haven't had enough broken discs to justify the cost. I have had one of my games bitten threw by my nephew and if I had small children living with me I'd definitely have one. So I guess you're in favor of Nintendo or Sony or whoever providing me replacement discs to my licensed software whenever anything happens to the original?
He isn't exactly an innocent victim and life does tend to suck after you've been caught breaking the law.
Do you ever speed? I mean, really, when everyone else is going 65 to 70 (or higher) miles per hour, are you really going to diligently only go 55?
Do you have any idea what the possible penalties for speeding are? I mean, sure, most people who get caught by the police get a slap-on-the-wrist fine, but do you know what you could face for speeding? Check your state laws; in involves losing your license to drive, facing hefty penalties, and jail time. If you've gotten speeding tickets before, that means that you're a repeat offender and they can really throw the book at you.
Yet still, I'll bet that when you get on the interstate, you go 70 right along with the rest of the cars. By your logic, that means that if a police officer pulls you over and arrests you, throws you in jail for a few months, you lose your license to drive, and have to pay thousands of dollars in fines, even though that may not be the normal punishment that fits the dinkiness of your crime, hey, you're not exactly an innocent victim, and your life sucking from now on is justified, since after all, you were caught breaking the law.
As far as I can tell, this guy was guilty of breaking a law that is just as silly as the one that says I'm supposed to drive 55 miles per hour on a straight road that is 10 lanes wide (I live in Atlanta, we really have interstates 10 lanes wide in 55 mile per hour zones), even if it's a lazy Sunday afternoon with perfect visibility and very low traffic volume.
I don't see anything in the article that says he was selling the modded boxes. I don't see anything that says he was using the modchips to steal games illegally. I don't see anything that says he was using modchips to distribute illegal copies of games. If he's guilty of some or all of those things, then maybe he does deserve a stiff penalty, but that should only happen after he's tried and convicted in court, after that little annoyance called due process runs its course. Right now, all I'm seeing is that he violated the DMCA, which says that regardless of your intent, you do not have the right to modify hardware that you purchased and own to suit your own needs. It says that corporations have the right to tell you what you can do with your own property. It says that if you're suspected of modifying your own property, regardless of intent and without due process, you will lose that property and more, and that's just not right.
Years from now, this law will be looked back upon as one of the most shameful and disgraceful that this country has ever had on the book. (At least, until the DMCA v2.0 is passed and Richard Stallman's dystopian future [gnu.org] really does come to pass.) In the meantime, I hope you rethink your ideas that just because something is illegal it is immoral, and that people deserve whatever comes to them for breaking laws that, frankly, need to be broken.
First they came for the filesharers, and I did not speak out--
because I was not a filesharer;
Then they came for the modchippers, and I did not speak out--
because I was not a modchipper; ...
you think the law is silly because you would like to break it, because doing so lets you get free games.
You, sir, are an ass. (And an anonymous one at that, the best kind.) That's what you get for thinking you know me. I don't have any illegal games. Zip, zero, zilch. If any official-type agencies want to come inspect my computers, they could do so to their heart's content and I would be free and clear because there's simply nothing there. Of course, I would do everything in my power to defend the right to not have my equipment searched, even though I have absolutely nothing to hide, and once they were done, they'd be facing a very costly lawsuit for doing so.
I don't think the law is "silly," I think it's extremely destructive. Not because I can't copy games, but because it tells me what I can and cannot do with my own property, a dangerous precedent with a repugnant slippery slope. My personal freedoms trump the profit-making capability of game developers and publishers. If that means that you or someone else can't make money because of my fair use rights and my right to do what I please with my property as long as it doesn't interfere with other people's rights, too damn bad. Find something else to do in which you can make money without destroying other people's freedoms.
As for your comments about speeding, they just go to show how much of an idiot you are. If you think that driving faster than the speed limit is not giving a fuck about people who get killed by speeding motorists, then I guess that 99.99% of all of the people in this country (including every cop I've ever seen on the interstate) doesn't give a fuck about road safety. Or maybe the simpler explanation--you're an idiot--is right instead. Believe what you want; given your assinine response, I don't really care about your opinions.
First of all, calculating braking distances isn't a "little math and physics." You say that as if any sixth grader should be able to churn out the numbers without any problem. It actually requires calculus and mechanics to figure out, something that even most smart people don't really know or care about. (But since I spent over two years as a physics major in college and took mechanics and second-year calculus my first quarter--and got A's in both--I might know a little about it.)
Second of all, I guess that means that technically, since the stopping distance-to-velocity equation holds even for very small values of velocity, we should really all just stay home. Anything else is just grossly unsafe.
Third of all, traffic fatalities have actually be steadily decreasing [dot.gov] per miles traveled. I know, it's an inconvenient little statistic, given all those maniacs out there like me who apparently don't give a rat's ass about safety.
Fourth of all, if you're going to present yourself as some sort of authority on math and physics, at least know what the hell you're talking about. Increasing your speed doesn't give diminishing returns with regards to travel time. If car A's average speed is exactly twice what car B's is, car A will arrive at its destination in exactly half the time as car B, period. Obviously, on surface streets, there's a practical limit as to how fast you can drive, but if you're able to increase your speed over a distance by x times, you will reduce your time to cover that distance by exactly a factor of x, no diminishing returns.
Also, the increase in stopping distance isn't an "expotentional" increase. It's not even an exponential increase [wikipedia.org]. If it were, the stopping distance would vary as some constant to the power of the velocity. It doesn't [gsu.edu]. It varies as the square of velocity, which is a quadratic [wikipedia.org] increase, not exponential.
But don't let that from keeping you from driving 55 miles per hour and feeling good about yourself. Around here, people who do that aren't making the roads safe, they're a nuisance, a road hazard that needs to take the bus instead (which, incidentally, also drives faster than 55) so that normal people can actually get where they're going.
Look at the sales for Oblivion. Now, look at the copy protection on it... Oh, you found none? And it had record breaking sales? Maybe if you and your company didn't make shitty games you wouldn't have problems making a profit.
As a game player, I say write some games worth buying or fuck off.
As a hobbyist game developer, I say I do, but how does my audience play them on a 27" TV without a modchip? If you mean TV-out, how do I train my audience to disconnect the PC, move it to the TV room, and connect it to the TV? And how do I train my audience to buy a GP2X so that they can play games on the bus or train without having to buy Datel's "Games n' Music" modchip for DS at Best Buy?
As a software writer, I say if it's worth playing it's worth buying. A completely different matter is if the game is unavailable to you. For example, I don't mind it too much if someone without a CC and no way to send me money "pirates" my software. He would not have bought it either, so why bother?
Actually, most of my software is free. I don't believe in inconveniencing my customer with copy protection and content crippling. Instead, I offer support to paying customers, and generally, it pays off. I have a
You fuck off. My game was obviously worth your trouble to pirate, so it's worth your trouble to buy.
But are all video games still available for sale? For video games that go out of print [wikipedia.org], how is one supposed to obtain a legitimate copy?
In this case IMHO culpability has a lot to do with intent.
Let's say I go to Sports Mart and buy a baseball bat. I then proceed to beat someone to death with it. Obviously the store here is not liable for what I did illegal with what is otherwise a legal tool. This is the most common argument made by mod chippers.
But this isn't really analogous. If I walk into a store, talking loudly on my phone about buying a baseball bat for the express purpose of beating someone to death with it, I would sincerely hop
If you know full well that 99% of your customer base is getting the chip to play pirated games (as opposed to homebrew, as opposed to abandonware which is of questionable legality anyways...), then I have no sympathy for you if your operation is busted and shut down by The Man.
Datel markets its "Games n' Music" modchip for DS explicitly for MP3 audio playback and homebrew games. It is not capable of running pirated DS games due to technical limitations. Does that earn more sympathy?
As an indie game dev
...how do you get your games onto end users' monitors that are larger than 19 inches (namely TVs)? How do you get GP2X units into end users' hands so that they can play your games?
And no amount of MAME and XBMC arguments you make will deny the fact that 99% of the chips you install will be used to pirate mass amounts of games.
Likewise, no amount of EBAY and GMAIL arguments you make will deny the fact that 99% of the cable modems you install wil
What does it matter what people do with your product? You make a mod chip to learn about the hardware and show off your skillz, maybe make some money. You're customizing the hardware. The old Altair and Atari PCs absolutely depended on people building their own mod chips.. and it's still perfectly legal of course to design your own hardware components for your computer... but somehow these gaming companies have made it illegal to modify your own hardware if you bought it from them! It's really a ridiculous situation, and as a promoter of common sense I say **** off.
I don't think it's the modchip seller's task to make sure his customers respect the law. How do you propose this should work?
It's not the gun seller's task to ensure his customers don't kill anyone. It's not the Internet provider's task to ensure his customers don't download pirated apps. It's not the car seller's task to ensure his customers aren't driving recklessly. We have the police and a judicial system for that.
In the meantime, we still don't have Super Paper Mario and Second Opinion for the Wii in Europe. Many Japanese games don't appear over here, ever. I'm willing to give you my money, and I can't, because the Wii is not region-free. Why in the world should it be illegal to install a mod chip in my Wii which allows me to buy your games?
Not allowed to see family members? (Score:4, Insightful)
Not sure that that means that some judge and jury said "you can't see your gf and daughter" - just sounds like the situation caused some tension???
Sen-Sational!
drug dealers everywhere (Score:2, Interesting)
> cracking heads over unlocked phones. Great."
There's nothing immoral about selling drugs (unless you think we should ban alcohol and tobacco, or that we've criminalised the right drugs and that growing, selling, buying and consuming cannabis somehow requires punishment), but making it possible for people to trivially pirate software is an area I believe to
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WTF "copy it digitally (and therefore flawlessly)" (Score:2)
"if people don't pay for an album that they would have done had they not been able to copy it digitally (and therefore flawlessly)"
Since when are mp3s flawless copies?
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Just because you download something does not in any way, shape, or form mean you were likely to buy it. Now, it is true that there will be a percentage of people who would otherwise have bought an album, but that percentage is, quite honestly, probably no more than 10% of people who download 50% or more of said album. And except for the "elite" pushed upon the masses by the record labels, the vast majority of artists will experience a large enough gain in listenership that the people who do buy the al
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Its plain as day that stealing the rent/food/medicine money from a fixed income senior causes more harm than taking the same amount from a wealthy multinational corporation. Surely anyone can see that.
That doesn't make stealing from wealthy corporations ok, but from a harm perspective there is an obvious difference.
I have no sympathy for anyone claiming they had to steal for food. That's a bullshit excuse to just
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Take 100,000 people; lets for the sake of argument suppose that they are all poor fixed income seniors living off dividend cheques from the corporation they own equal shares in.
Now, steal $1000 from one of those individuals; suddenly he can't pay his rent, or buy food, or refill a prescription. His best chance is to take out a loan, and try to pay it back $100 month over the next year; which would make a
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PS, if you think France in the era of the book is bad, look around at current US laws.
-- Glad to be canadian
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
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"If you want an unlocked phone, maybe you should .... well, I don't know. Maybe buy a fucking phone that is not fucking locked."
The cell carriers justify selling locked phones by saying that the owner needs to be with the company for a certain length of time to "pay back" the subsidized cost of the phone ... HOWEVER, they also say that if you cancel the plan early, you have to pay a penalty equal to the amount of the balance of the subsidy. So why can't I have my phone unlocked after I've paid for it, in
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Isn't that pretty much how crystal meth is made? There are grades to drugs. I think that if you rank drugs from safest to most dangerous, you'd get something like:
1 weed, salvia, cigarettes
2 mushrooms, lsd
3 alcohol, cocaine, crack, opium, xanax, demerol
4 heroin, crack, crystal meth, methadone, paxil
with the caveat that category
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The second problem is there are certainly people that can handle drugs but there is a large number of people that cannot. How do you separate them out? The people that will utterly freak out on PCP or LSD. The people that after three doses of coke will do literally anything for the next, including sell their children, rob relatives, etc.
As far as I know, there
Re:drug dealers everywhere (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, I meant people who are not criminals, demonized, or marginalized for their choice of chemicals. I think that pharmaceuticals are far far worse than my first two categories (except cigs, maybe). People are completely trusting of their doctors, who are completely trusting of the sponsorship of the drug companies. I'm far, far, far more selective about what I put in my body than most people, even though it includes illegal substances, and things child-drugging alcoholic valium-popping H3-driving soccer moms consider dangerous.
We could continue as a culture suggesting that people not do drugs. For categories 2 through 4, I'm suggesting at the very least NOT throwing some 19-year old in prison because he was at a low point when someone offered him some coke. I'm suggesting that if someone does acid, he shouldn't have to worry about asking for help if he gets freaked out. I'm not saying people SHOULD do drugs. I will not ever do any of my class 4 drugs. I think that the current system of what is essentially abstinence-only education is bullshit and non-functional. If I had been better-educated about drugs, I wouldn't have called a whole bunch of people the first time I did mushrooms.
I'm merely suggesting that a more permissive society lends itself to children coming to the proper people for answers for difficult questions, rather than having to learn about drugs from drug dealers. Try learning about a Ford from a Ford dealer. Or a computer from a computer salesman (why yes, it DOES play with your balls!).
An educated and judicious acid-user (not abuser) can tell if someone will have problems when they take it. Educating people about the drug, again, is the safest plan. I am now very very very educated. After a few bad experiences, I found erowid.org, and it has kept me healthy when I did drugs I was going to do anyway (though I may have taken some of those trips back now), and it kept me safe and sane knowing what was going to happen to me and knowing that I'd done everything I could to keep safe.
I have seen my best friend from childhood end up hooked on crystal meth. It was a lack of education, and a lack of hope. The inexistence of support structures, the pressure from land developers to get poor mexicans off their prime golf-course real estate, and finally, him being careless. I went back to Mexico, and he wouldn't smoke weed anymore because it made him feel sick. He smoked with me once, and got sick and lashed out at me so violently that I almost fainted. I tripped with him, pleaded with him, tried to get him to get his motherfucking visa so I could pay for his ticket up to the US so he could get out of his toxic environment. I tried everything short of duct-taping him to a tree. Now, in retrospect, I would have. He had an alcoholic father, and a family that used to ride our asses about weed before we ever smoked, and they were friendly to us when we finally started. His mother ended up fucking his dad's best friend, and his dad moved back to Sinaloa, and he was stuck being the asshole head of family that his two sisters and his mother berated. Nobody gave a fuck about him. So yes, I have seen the problems with drugs, I just don't see where any of the above would have been made any worse by him not being considered a criminal and a piece of shit, and a little bit of straightforward education.
Parent
end user (Score:2)
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The US democractic system is broken. (Score:5, Insightful)
As long as people with money have more influence over those who make laws than people without money, the system will continue to represent the interests of those who have money. Look at the rejection of the justice system of allowing people on welfare to object to random searches of their houses; that's a rather large difference from what the US constitution has to say on the matter, but it is done to serve the interests of those who pay taxes against those who lack the ability (for whatever reason) to pay taxes. MPAA and RIAA crackdowns and suing actions (including those against the Swedes in their own country via the US gov't!) are similar reflections of the concept that money is power, not personal choice.
If you wish to not be in a situation where money decides power, move to a country with a representative democracy, where the representatives are purely chosen via 1 vote per 1 person, and where lobbying money is not allowed.
Which country? (Score:2)
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And which country would this be? And when will the US invade it for 'harboring/training/aiding/abetting terrorists'?
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What you call "the lobby system", we call "cash for questions" and it is a crime.
Most recently, where there was any question that money may have bought political favours (the cash-for-honours scandal), the police pulled in Tony Blair and half his cabinet for questioning under oath.
Sadly, I think many Americans could not even imagine the police questioning Bush over the Rove affair, or misrepresenting facts to the UN, or any of the many other scandals I find it difficult to ke
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There's no such thing as the "United Kingdom" anymore. Now it's just called Airstrip One...
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Not having a clue what you were referring to, I started doing some research. I assume you mean the decision by the 9th Circuit by 2-1 split and denied en banc hearing of th
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I'll take it as a safe bet that owning an XBox 360 or PS3 makes you are one of the people who have money. Especially if you are willing to chance taking a soldering iron to a $400 appliance.
But neither would I be be surprised to learn that your mutual fund or 401(K) retirement plan has substantial investments in Microsoft, Sony, an
This has to stop, now. (Score:2)
And why the hell are modchips illegal? If someone's committing sizable copyright infringement, you can already nail them for something. You don't need a redundant law that criminalizes the guy who wanted to see if his X-Box could run Linux.
How is installing modchips illegal? (Score:2, Insightful)
TM, (C), Pat exist. "IP" does not. (Score:5, Informative)
"All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective owners. Comments are owned by the Poster. The Rest © 1997-2007 SourceForge, Inc."
Parent
hmm (Score:4, Insightful)
Because people can't be concerned about more than one thing at once. While I can sympathize with the thought behind this, the argument "they shouldn't enforce crime X until they've completely eradicated crime Y" is a ridiculous one.
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It's all about priorities you shithead. Copyright infringement is a civil matter. Can't you understand that?
Go read what I wrote again, this time read every word you illiterate cretin. I
This is Dumb. (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm not really a gamer, but I have to say using an original XBox (cheaply acquired, second hand, pawn, etc) as a network media front end for something like MythTV [mythtv.org] is pretty awesome... This isn't really possible without modifcations. I'm not interested in playing games.. but what I am interested in is a cheap media center box with decent TV out capability. That is one Really Awesome, Non-Infringing use.
I don't really think any of the analogies fit, either. It is what it is, which is not necessarily used for game piracy (though probably is some significant percentage of the time). On the one hand you can say it is like installing feature X in your car to get more horsepower. Well, that'll make your car go faster... which is potentially illegal. I mean your stock Geo is perfectly capable of moving along at any set speed limit.. so any modification to go faster is intended to break the speed limit.
However, that would require an intelligent and thoughtful analysis of the situation: the parties involved, the scope and scale of the crime, etc. Apparently the folks in charge here here were either intellectually incapable of that or Conditioned to Obey(tm). Either way it is scary, and that is probably the intention.
I feel sorry for the folks involved. Probably, on the whole, just nerds like us in the wrong place at the wrong time. One looses one's stuff for an inexcusably long time and one is presumed guilty. If one is lucky one gets to be a media poster child on some scale about the "Dangers of XYZ". I would hope these folks can truly get a trial with a jury of their peers AND that the judge doesn't force the omission of "irrelevant facts" like "there were no pirated games found at the home". I would love to see this type of thing crushed by Jury Nullification. (If you ever want out of Jury Duty go up to the prosecutor, lean in, and whisper 'I know all About Jury Nullification [wikipedia.org]').
Consider the BS one has to go through for simple things involving the government such as DMV tag renewals, tickets for various minor offenses, property tax, etc and then consider the crap these folks will have to endure, probably for years, over a mod chip. This is dumb.
good publicity (Score:3, Insightful)
So these stories play right into the hands of people who push these kinds of actions. Detainment and confiscation without due process is a very powerful method of enforcing will upon the masses. Stories such as this allow those who wish to oppress to succeed.
What is unfortunate is that we fight fear with fear. We think laws are unjust because it causes those who break the laws to suffer. This method of fighting injustice does not work because sometimes in order to enforce a law people must suffer.
So why do not have the courage to fight from basic principles. We cannot take a persons stuff away without a conviction of a crime by his peers. We cannot take a persons freedom without probable cause and timely due process. We cannot say that person is a witch, and then kill them knowing full well no jury will convict us. At least in the US, we were founded on the principle that we have inherent rights, and that those rights were given to us by our creator, though it seems that some people believe, especially in the US administration, only Americans were given those rights, or perhaps they do not believe in a creator, even though in their cowardice they claim to.
I think that some people want it all. They are cowards who are perfectly happy to have others suffer without due process, but when it happens to them they whine to the media. Get used to it. The congress is afraid of being called traitors, that they are further increasing the power of the government to take whatever they wish from the people without due process. This little mod chip thing is small potatoes, and meaningless. The power was given freely by the republican representatives of the people.
The strawman argument (Score:2)
ICE - US Customs and Immigration Enforcement - employs 15,00.
CPB - US Customs and Border Protection - Including Border Patrol - 44,000
Law enforcement has the resources to multi-task. The FBI alone has a budget of $6 billion. "Getting your priorites straight" does not reqiure handing out a lifetime
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Yeah, he *is* a victim (Score:5, Insightful)
Do you ever speed? I mean, really, when everyone else is going 65 to 70 (or higher) miles per hour, are you really going to diligently only go 55?
Do you have any idea what the possible penalties for speeding are? I mean, sure, most people who get caught by the police get a slap-on-the-wrist fine, but do you know what you could face for speeding? Check your state laws; in involves losing your license to drive, facing hefty penalties, and jail time. If you've gotten speeding tickets before, that means that you're a repeat offender and they can really throw the book at you.
Yet still, I'll bet that when you get on the interstate, you go 70 right along with the rest of the cars. By your logic, that means that if a police officer pulls you over and arrests you, throws you in jail for a few months, you lose your license to drive, and have to pay thousands of dollars in fines, even though that may not be the normal punishment that fits the dinkiness of your crime, hey, you're not exactly an innocent victim, and your life sucking from now on is justified, since after all, you were caught breaking the law.
As far as I can tell, this guy was guilty of breaking a law that is just as silly as the one that says I'm supposed to drive 55 miles per hour on a straight road that is 10 lanes wide (I live in Atlanta, we really have interstates 10 lanes wide in 55 mile per hour zones), even if it's a lazy Sunday afternoon with perfect visibility and very low traffic volume.
I don't see anything in the article that says he was selling the modded boxes. I don't see anything that says he was using the modchips to steal games illegally. I don't see anything that says he was using modchips to distribute illegal copies of games. If he's guilty of some or all of those things, then maybe he does deserve a stiff penalty, but that should only happen after he's tried and convicted in court, after that little annoyance called due process runs its course. Right now, all I'm seeing is that he violated the DMCA, which says that regardless of your intent, you do not have the right to modify hardware that you purchased and own to suit your own needs. It says that corporations have the right to tell you what you can do with your own property. It says that if you're suspected of modifying your own property, regardless of intent and without due process, you will lose that property and more, and that's just not right.
Years from now, this law will be looked back upon as one of the most shameful and disgraceful that this country has ever had on the book. (At least, until the DMCA v2.0 is passed and Richard Stallman's dystopian future [gnu.org] really does come to pass.) In the meantime, I hope you rethink your ideas that just because something is illegal it is immoral, and that people deserve whatever comes to them for breaking laws that, frankly, need to be broken.
First they came for the filesharers, and I did not speak out--
...
because I was not a filesharer;
Then they came for the modchippers, and I did not speak out--
because I was not a modchipper;
(I think you can guess the rest.)
Parent
Re:Yeah, he *is* a victim (Score:5, Interesting)
You, sir, are an ass. (And an anonymous one at that, the best kind.) That's what you get for thinking you know me. I don't have any illegal games. Zip, zero, zilch. If any official-type agencies want to come inspect my computers, they could do so to their heart's content and I would be free and clear because there's simply nothing there. Of course, I would do everything in my power to defend the right to not have my equipment searched, even though I have absolutely nothing to hide, and once they were done, they'd be facing a very costly lawsuit for doing so.
I don't think the law is "silly," I think it's extremely destructive. Not because I can't copy games, but because it tells me what I can and cannot do with my own property, a dangerous precedent with a repugnant slippery slope. My personal freedoms trump the profit-making capability of game developers and publishers. If that means that you or someone else can't make money because of my fair use rights and my right to do what I please with my property as long as it doesn't interfere with other people's rights, too damn bad. Find something else to do in which you can make money without destroying other people's freedoms.
As for your comments about speeding, they just go to show how much of an idiot you are. If you think that driving faster than the speed limit is not giving a fuck about people who get killed by speeding motorists, then I guess that 99.99% of all of the people in this country (including every cop I've ever seen on the interstate) doesn't give a fuck about road safety. Or maybe the simpler explanation--you're an idiot--is right instead. Believe what you want; given your assinine response, I don't really care about your opinions.
Parent
Re:Yeah, he *is* a victim (Score:5, Insightful)
First of all, calculating braking distances isn't a "little math and physics." You say that as if any sixth grader should be able to churn out the numbers without any problem. It actually requires calculus and mechanics to figure out, something that even most smart people don't really know or care about. (But since I spent over two years as a physics major in college and took mechanics and second-year calculus my first quarter--and got A's in both--I might know a little about it.)
Second of all, I guess that means that technically, since the stopping distance-to-velocity equation holds even for very small values of velocity, we should really all just stay home. Anything else is just grossly unsafe.
Third of all, traffic fatalities have actually be steadily decreasing [dot.gov] per miles traveled. I know, it's an inconvenient little statistic, given all those maniacs out there like me who apparently don't give a rat's ass about safety.
Fourth of all, if you're going to present yourself as some sort of authority on math and physics, at least know what the hell you're talking about. Increasing your speed doesn't give diminishing returns with regards to travel time. If car A's average speed is exactly twice what car B's is, car A will arrive at its destination in exactly half the time as car B, period. Obviously, on surface streets, there's a practical limit as to how fast you can drive, but if you're able to increase your speed over a distance by x times, you will reduce your time to cover that distance by exactly a factor of x, no diminishing returns.
Also, the increase in stopping distance isn't an "expotentional" increase. It's not even an exponential increase [wikipedia.org]. If it were, the stopping distance would vary as some constant to the power of the velocity. It doesn't [gsu.edu]. It varies as the square of velocity, which is a quadratic [wikipedia.org] increase, not exponential.
But don't let that from keeping you from driving 55 miles per hour and feeling good about yourself. Around here, people who do that aren't making the roads safe, they're a nuisance, a road hazard that needs to take the bus instead (which, incidentally, also drives faster than 55) so that normal people can actually get where they're going.
Parent
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Oh, you found none? And it had record breaking sales?
Maybe if you and your company didn't make shitty games you wouldn't have problems making a profit.
Are hobbyist game developers "thieving swine"? (Score:2, Insightful)
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He's gone too far, how DARE someone offer a service to someone...?
WTF are you trying to say here? What 'clue' are you talking about?
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How do I train my audience...? (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
A completely different matter is if the game is unavailable to you. For example, I don't mind it too much if someone without a CC and no way to send me money "pirates" my software. He would not have bought it either, so why bother?
Actually, most of my software is free. I don't believe in inconveniencing my customer with copy protection and content crippling. Instead, I offer support to paying customers, and generally, it pays off. I have a
Video games go out of print (Score:2)
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In this case IMHO culpability has a lot to do with intent.
Let's say I go to Sports Mart and buy a baseball bat. I then proceed to beat someone to death with it. Obviously the store here is not liable for what I did illegal with what is otherwise a legal tool. This is the most common argument made by mod chippers.
But this isn't really analogous. If I walk into a store, talking loudly on my phone about buying a baseball bat for the express purpose of beating someone to death with it, I would sincerely hop
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If you know full well that 99% of your customer base is getting the chip to play pirated games (as opposed to homebrew, as opposed to abandonware which is of questionable legality anyways...), then I have no sympathy for you if your operation is busted and shut down by The Man.
Datel markets its "Games n' Music" modchip for DS explicitly for MP3 audio playback and homebrew games. It is not capable of running pirated DS games due to technical limitations. Does that earn more sympathy?
As an indie game dev
And no amount of MAME and XBMC arguments you make will deny the fact that 99% of the chips you install will be used to pirate mass amounts of games.
Likewise, no amount of EBAY and GMAIL arguments you make will deny the fact that 99% of the cable modems you install wil
Re:Video games go out of print (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
The seller should not have to police the buyer (Score:3, Insightful)
It's not the gun seller's task to ensure his customers don't kill anyone. It's not the Internet provider's task to ensure his customers don't download pirated apps. It's not the car seller's task to ensure his customers aren't driving recklessly. We have the police and a judicial system for that.
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Trouble to pirate = approximately 0
Trouble to buy = roughly $50
Given that there are two widely different costs here, your argument makes no sense.
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