From a forum post I made on indiegamer.com

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As for piracy itself, I've long thought a simple change would prevent it:

Create a law that would fine anyone caught pirating by about five times the amount of the cost of what they've pirated, and pay half that amount to the companies they pirated from, and the other half to the person who turned the person in. ^^

While it's difficult to prove that someone pirates, I think you can do it in two ways: if someone has, say, $100,000 of games, music, movies, software, etc., on their computer hard drive, no records of purchase for *any* of those, no boxes, reciepts, etc., and only has a minimal salary, I think most judges would find that adequate to prove piracy. Likewise, many people boast about it as well -- I think those public confessions collected from public forums or blogs would be adequate to prove it. Neither of those requires draconian privacy invasions to enforce, all they require is reasonable suspicion leading to a warrant for looking at their hard drive.

Swedish police took down a computer piracy ring/site, and the next day their own Swedish police site was down, the pirates having attacked it in retaliation. Even odder:

"Piratpartiet, a Swedish political party affiliated with a view on copyright very similar to The Pirate Bay, has called the raid illegal. They have also accused the Swedish government of responding to pressure from American media companies, a concern shared by others in the country. [...] Piratpariet and the Pirate Bureau are organizing "Pirate Demonstration Saturday," a protest in Stockholm beginning at 3pm local time." [*]

An entire political party centered around and named after a platform of piracy exists in Sweden! Hilarious. That's as funny as the marijuana political party in Canada, or the Green political party in America.

http://www.comipress.com/post1147032347a.html (via harlockhero)

"The volume of pirated goods has been increasing to unprecedented levels. I believe that the circulation of pirated goods is well over 100 times that of legitimate retail versions."

"Mangaka continue creating their work not for money, but because they love writing. When I was talking with fellow mangaka, somebody asked "don't you feel guilty getting paid to draw manga?" and everybody answered "I do." Mangaka truly love manga, so if they really want to write something then they'll do so, even for free. Because of that, up until now they have not been very interested in copyrights. I want people to understand that protecting intellectual properties is important for reasons greater than money as well."

Jackie Chan & Arnold Schwarzenegger star together in a commercial to combat piracy:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6443035544827856436&q=Jackie+Chan

"Piracy operations in both the U.S. and in the U.K. were brought to justice, as nineteen members of an international piracy warez group have been indicted"

I like this. Tolerating piracy is like tolerating terrorism: it will just grow and grow unless you wipe it out with nuclear weapons.

http://blather.newdream.net/e/eachother.html

that site is kind of brilliant, actually.

paper! read this one: http://blather.newdream.net/c/copyright.html

http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=us&vol=000&invol=04-480

this suing of the psp people is getting kind of useless as new psp programs are created as old ones are shut down. what's interesting in this one is that grokster is held liable because of "evidence of stated or indicated intent to promote infringing uses" which is a good precedent to set. still, i wish they'd just sue and fine the individual pirates themselves, it'd strike more fear into the hearts of criminals.

from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright

"In the United States, copyrights are automatic as soon as the expression is secured in a fixed medium (for example, a drawing, sheet music, a videotape or a letter). "

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gizmog and i were having a discussion, where i brought up this example: let's say a kid whistles a tune. then some bloke comes along and hears that tune as he's passing the kid by on the street. he then publishes the song and makes millions. is he breaking copyright?

i thought he was, but it turns out that he *wasn't*, because the kid's whistling was not in fixed medium.

here's another example:

let's say the kid was instead telling another kid a very long story which he had made up. let's say it was as good as a novel. that's not impossible, there are some savant kids. the bloke then writes down the novel from the kid's oral speech. and then publishes that. and then makes millions more. that also would not break copyright.

i think that goes against the spirit of copyright and should be changed. there is no reason that a fixed medium should be necessary to copyright a work. if i present a design document for a game in a conversation to someone, or if i present the same exact design document it written in a livejournal entry, there is no basic difference, but one is copyrighted and the other isn't.

from http://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/notes.html

"To the best of my knowledge, all texts appearing on this site are free from copyright and may be reproduced and distributed in any form but certainly not for profit."

ignoring that it's logically incoherent to say that something is not in copyright but can't be reproduced for profit, i've always wanted to create an article, book, or game, and give it something like this copyright notice:

"This work may be reproduced and distributed in any form but only for profit. You may not distribute this without charging some amount of money for it, at least $0.01 American, or one unit of whatever the lowest unit of currency is in your country."

http://melaman2.com/cartoons/toons-A.html

cartoon theme songs. old and recent cartoons. not a very extensive collection, it had some of the ones i liked: he-man & she-ra, care bears, voltron, thundercats, inspector gadget. but it was also missing a lot of theme songs i was looking forward to hearing again: strawberry shortcake, rainbow brite, popples, glow worms, my little pony.

(and no one laugh at the girly shows i liked as a kid -- they were usually more entertaining and had better plots than most cartoons of the time.)

i'm not sure about the copyright status of this site. theme songs are pretty short (average mp3 size seems to be less than 100k, about 30 seconds) so perhaps they can be considered short enough to be fair use (like quotes are, or like excerpts of books for reviews, or like lj icons), but fair use is fickle. i'll delete them in 24 hours just to be sure.

[06:07:17] Rinku> there should be a :P operator
[06:07:26] FyreWulff> you can do that Rinku
[06:07:31] FyreWulff> I think
[06:07:36] Rinku> :P means 'ignore the preceding variables'
[06:07:39] Rinku> 'they mean nothing'
[06:07:45] Fortis> haha
[06:07:57] FyreWulff> if ( happiness :P max_happy )
[06:07:57] Fortis> "who is to say what these variables mean? perhaps god :P"
[06:07:59] FyreWulff> or wait
[06:08:06] FyreWulff> if ( gamefinish :P)
[06:08:08] SilentAngel> HAHAHAHA.
[06:08:14] FyreWulff> your code would look like a chat log

the ohrrpgce source code was released. under GPL (boo!).

a funny thing james paige said in an interview (paraphrased) that paper might like: 'i want to release all my code as open source. but i also want to make a living as a programmer. how do i do that? one day i will figure it out.'

from http://huminf.uib.no/~jill/

"In France this summer people kept recommending I watch the documentary Être
et avoir, a documentary following an amazing teacher in a one-room French
rural school. The film was a huge success, making 2 million in profits,
and the teacher, Georges Lopez, having been paid nothing for his immense
involvement in the film, felt exploited. So he sued, asking to be paid as
an actor, and also arguing that his teaching methods were his intellectual
property and therefore protected. He lost, as The Guardian reports, and
filmmakers are thrilled that they can continue to make documentaries without
paying their subjects."

http://www.gizmodo.com/gadgets/portable-media/index.php#gates-interview-part-four-communists-and-drm-029706 (link via andrewducker)

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the interview is good so i have nothing to add to it, except that i do think gates is a little less extreme than he should be, but that's probably just a limit of being in the public eye; just as presidents need to be compromisers to remain in power, ceo's need to as well, because their shareholders vote them in and out (either by buying and selling stocks, or, if they own more stocks than the ceo, directly voting him out).