Well Ubisoft is already doing that with their games on PC, its been bummed past but its still there.
and censorship, whether it be about ‘obscene’ things (like in Australia already) or piracy (like this proposed bill.) How long until outsiders (like myself) who criticize the government or just ask logical questions get blocked? It IS a slippery slope when you’re dealing with censorship of any kind.
Swan: They could start doing what Blizzard was doing back in the day, and give incentive to buy the game (battle.net), rather than what they’re doing now: forcing everyone to play online only and stripping LAN, giving them built-in DRM. (battle.net 2.0)
The former probably leads to more piracy, but I would argue it doesn’t necessarily lead to fewer sales, and it certainly garners better reviews, praise, and word-of-mouth “advertising” than the latter.
In my opinion, focus on combating piracy less and on reasons to buy your game (rather than pirate) more.
Edit: And the fact that Starcraft 1 is STILL selling new copies despite how easy it is to pirate must mean something.
I’d link the article again, but clearly you lack the mental facilities necessary to understand what a fucktwat you’re being right now.
Or perhaps I just disagree with that article?
I’d make an immature comment about mental facilities as well bit you’re an admin.
Moreover what they plan to do also infringes on laws of other countries and their rights, shut down foreign sites, pah, what the hell do they think they are god?
You disagree with what exactly? The most basic of argument fallacies? That’s not exactly a topic up for debate there. “Slippery slope” is almost never a valid argument, especially when you’re comparing anti-piracy to blacklisting of dissenting opinions. That’s completely idiotic.
They can’t shut down foreign sites without the cooperation of said country. They have no jurisdiction there, no amount of lawmaking can change that. See the Large Hadron Collider lawsuit for a perfect example of that.
Infringing on what rights exactly? That’s just offensive to anyone who knows about actual infringement issues. There is no inalienable right to pirate a movie. There is no right to steal music.
Not exactly sure what God has to do with anti-piracy laws.
What about nations without copyright laws? This plan of theirs infringes on the rights of those citizens, or do the rights of nations without corporate masters not matter to the US anymore?
On the subject of your argument fallacies, perhaps we have reached a fundamental disagreement in ways of thinking, I believe every action has consequences and every action leads to another by the same party, thus, slippery slope can in fact apply, regardless of what Wikipedia has to say on the matter.
The fact that you think “what Wikipedia has to say on the matter” is relevant at all shows how completely ignorant you are of debate techniques and fallacies. That’s just not how formal arguments work, sorry.
And what the hell are you talking about with that copyright law nonsense? How does this plan infringe on any rights at all? It’s taking copyrighted material off the internet. Again, there is no fundamental right to piracy. I’m not sure if there even are any major countries without copyright laws… but that’s hardly relevant.
How are any rights infringed in any way? Again, legally American courts cannot force foreign nations to do anything, so even if they did have a right to piracy (?!), we couldn’t do anything to infringe it.
Unless you’re saying their rights are infringed because they lose access to American sites, which is complete nonsense as far as the law is concerned. If the sites and servers are hosted on American soil or owned by American citizens, they must abide by American laws. I’m pretty sure no one’s ever successfully used the “my target demographic is African natives so you can’t shut me down” defense in court.
I’d just like to state here that in the article you linked, daz, it states in the first sentence that:
So there are some instances where the slippery slope argument is, in fact, applicable.
Okay, but again, a slippery slope between anti-piracy and fascist censorship is completely fucking ridiculous.
It’s less ridiculous when the bill’s not about removal of content, but rather blacklisting of domain names. Which, if I follow what you were trying to say, doesn’t actually help with the bit you posted earlier about the internet’s growth, since the domain names are still unavailable.
If I understand it correctly, websites can be added to the secondary blacklist by the attorney general without going through court at all. It seems like that’s an easy place for a slippery slope to develop, even if you do think it’s just paranoia.
Well, I’d love to discuss the finer points of the bill itself, but the original post didn’t link anything. All it said was “they want to enact an anti piracy bill they’re fascists wah they want to take copyright-infringing websites offline as per existing laws.”
And I’m far too busy to be googling bills for the sake of an internet debate.
Maybe Zurg actually has a point, but it’s all in the presentation sometimes.
Either way, I’m having trouble seeing how there’s any possible negative to a bill that would only–as far as the topic so far indicates–remove copyright-infringing sites.
Books that publish copyrighted material without permission are illegal. Music sampling, video games, etc. can all be guilty of illegal plagiarism – and those are subsequently prevented from sale. However, freedom of expression has remained intact despite that. No amount of “you can’t make money off someone else’s hard work” has ever led to someone getting their book banned because it said a bad word about the president.
Why should this be any different? It’s nothing more than enforcing existing copyright laws. If they break the law, they get punished and their website goes offline.
Shocking concept, right?
In the original post, this is compared to China, which … does China actually have censored internet? I’m not sure. For the sake of argument, let’s say he meant North Korea. There, yes, they have media embargoes and ban anti-government messages and such.
That’s not what this is about. This is about protecting existing copyrighted material by removing the offending material from the internet. Single-region censorship wouldn’t really help either. That’s the funny thing about the internet. Once it gets out online, it’s REALLY damn hard to get rid of it. Just ask any regretful camwhore.
If they do end up enacting a dubious bill like this, don’t blame the government. Blame the dumbass pirates that forced their hand to do this to begin with.
Yeah, it kinda seemed like a few people in this conversation weren’t actually sure what the bill did.
The original intent for the bill is, for the most part, fine… Aside from the fact that Viacom is going to take another swing at Youtube as soon as the bill gets pushed through, and projectplaylist might have some trouble. I’m mostly worried about someone twisting the power that this bill grants and taking it in a bad direction. And in general, I’d rather see removal of content than outright blacklisting of domain names. It gives a chance to appeal on charges before punishment is administered, rather than appealing punishment afterwords, causing downtime/drama/profit loss/whatever.
So was that post referring to domain name supply, or something else entirely? (And if you do find that link somewhere, I’m actually interested in checking it out, but don’t go out of your way to look for it.)
The internet is a form of press. Therefore, it is protected in our Constitutional rights. I know you’re thinking, hey, torrent sites don’t count, and neither does porn. Well, in a way it does.
As seen above, THE RIGHT TO RECIVE INFORMATION regardless of medium used. Censoring the internet goes against our first Constitutional right. And I am concerned that our Nation is becoming more and more facist, and this is just another step. We’re on our way to being controled by the Government.
So, to sum this all up, LETS GO TO CANADA!!!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech
Thats my info source.
Very much so. Google has actually gotten a lot of grief over allowing their engine to be filtered over there.
google china search: democracy
0 results
Yup, that’s me, right there. Not kidding, I have no clue what exactly the bill entails. I mean, I’m kind of getting the gist of it (thanks to your posts, Cloud), but I’m still pretty much in the dark.
Short version: The bill creates two domain name blacklists. One can be added to by a court, and the other is controlled by the attorney general. All ISPs in the US must block the domains listed in the first, while they are “strongly encouraged” to block the ones on the second. I haven’t read the bill in its entirety (too busy), but on the website I linked to earlier, “strongly encouraged” was summarized as such:
They didn’t specify what that immunity really did for the ISPs, but I can’t say I like certain ISPs from having immunity to much of anything.
Here is the bill in .pdf form for your perusal, this is assuming that you are capable (as I am barely so) of understanding legalese.
already posted that on the first page, which everyone ignored