Quote:
Originally Posted by mflood
"Criminal scum."
Heh. Have you ever driven over the speed limit, or rolled through a stopsign? You realize those things are probably more dangerous to society than torrenting a tv show or two, right?  I don't mean to advocate piracy and I don't intend to do so, but the holier than thou attitude doesn't really fly with me. Disagreeing with piracy is fine and good, but the outrage is a little unjustified, don't you think? |
To be honest, I don't mind TV show downloads. I recently changed the cable box to my cable TV service and ended up getting a free DVR. When I watch a network TV show I've recorded to time shift, I do fast forward past the commercials. To me, downloading a TV show is like time shifting using the DVR. Just without the hassle of fast forwarding past the commercials.
But you do have to look at it from Harry's POV. He writes commercial software. If people can get it for free, some that may have purchased it won't purchase it since it is now free. Granted, the people who download it for free that would never had purchased it is no loss. But some people when they cannot get a free copy will go and purchase. Those sales are something that Harry has lost out on. So yes, I do see things from his side of the fence.
I don't think most of us can say we've never downloaded something for free that we should have paid for or used shareware without paying. The thing is, though with some software, you have to go through so many hoops to get it to work, that it is easier and less of a hassle to find a pirated copy. Take WindowsXP for example. We have a spare computer that has XP running on it. We added more memory and a CD-Burner/DVD reader combo drive to it all at the same time. XP then decided to tell us we needed to activate it again. So we tried to activate it. Microsoft's activation system said our key was not valid. I called Microsoft to try to get a valid key. The support person gave me two keys that neither worked. These keys came directly from Microsoft. The only choice I had left was to goo out on the net to look for a program to fix the problem. So what ended up happening is I had to find an illegal way to solve a problem that should have been solved legally.
The point being, make it too hard to do things legally and people will turn to the much easier illegal way. And once they realize how easy it can be to get stuff for free, you might have just lost a paying customer thanks to someone convoluted method of forcing them to jump through hoops to get some piece of software to run.
Anyway, Demonoid is dead. It's never coming back.