Quote:
Originally Posted by HansTWN
What does spam (a very serious issue, no doubt) have to do with piracy? Why should the existence of some other problem make piracy a non-issue?
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Piracy: unauthorized copying & distribution of copyrighted works, made tremendously more problematic by the technological advances of the internet.
Spam: unauthorized communication often with a commercial or hostile intent, made tremendously more problematic by the technological advances of the internet.
Both are digital versions of long-standing problems that exploded with the internet. Online, both are hard to track down the origins of; both have been entrenched in the internet since the earliest days of usenet and possibly before. Both are impossible to identify the damages from a single act; any real damage from them can only be measured in aggregate.
I
1) Do not believe the publishers' (nor the MPAA's, nor the RIAA's) estimates of the money they are losing to "piracy." I'm not sure "digital piracy" is costing *any* money to the entertainment industries, although I believe individual creators are sometimes losing money to it. (And it's their right to seek recompense for that damage--but we don't pass laws against wearing shoes because one guy's lawn gets destroyed when people walk on it.)
2) Do not believe it is possible to make "piracy" more difficult without crippling the usefulness of the internet as a whole.
3) Believe that spam costs businesses, and therefore economy in which those businesses exist, billions of dollars a year in designing software filters, coping with viruses, and individual attention.
4) Believe that spam could be effectively destroyed by removing the "corporate free speech" protection and being willing to prosecute it as large-scale harassment, or encouraging class-action suits against those ISPs that allow it. (And a few other things to deal with overseas havens.
5) Refuse to believe that the governments involved are actually concerned with "lost revenue due to people exploiting technology online," as opposed to making big media corporations happy, if they're not willing to put effort and research into stopping the *other* internet exploits--spam, viruses, malware--that are costing more money than can be shown, by any remotely objective measure, to be lost to "piracy."