Researcher Goes Inside the Criminal Mind of a File-Sharer

[DanielDeFig]

I think this simple jpg does a better job at explaining the intricacies of a "file-sharer" than another (probably overpaid) study could ever do.

[http://www.imagebam.com/image/f9bd3f110087167]

This jpg is pretty much exactly what my opinion on piracy and file-sharing is.

As a lot of ppl on this forum have stated, file-sharing in itself is not a crime. The guy in the article doesn't seem to understand this. When discussing file-sharing with my parents, they will often talk of how both tapes and records being copied and shared amongst friends was a common practice. Clearly, that guy wasn't one of those ppl, and it is therefore no wonder he doesn't understand how it has translated to the digital age.

 

[Patrick Dare]

Spoiler: snip

Spoiler: post

If one really made the status of "Infamous" it would be aXXo [ movies ] or Razor1337 [ games ].

Razor1911 [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Razor1911], and they don't exactly seem like kids to me.

Leechers and seeders are standard terms for torrent programs, they simply mean ones who have completed their download and continue uploading to other users, respectively the ones who haven't yet completed it. Many private (registration-driven) torrent sites have rules in place (such as maintaining a positive upload/download ratio) to keep the system working properly. In exchange, they offer moderated content (virus-free and higher quality standards) and early uploads for the newest releases. If a user is registered to one of these sites, they'll likely be seeders just to keep a positive ratio, and often leave their torrent program on overnight or something similar. So if they also happen to have downloaded something from public torrents, that ratio will also increase.
Some people of course do it because of an odd sense of altruism (which is why piracy initially started), but i believe that's not the main reason most of them are doing it.

The researcher should be fired for being so gulible and for knowing nothing at all about those he is researching... he's just quite simply bad at his job, and forming all the wrong conclusions.. back to school I think, because he obviously eaned nothing first time around.

While you, of course, need to be apointed a Honoris Causa degree for your incredible amount of knowing-what-you're-talking-about. Because of all that research you obviously did to come to such an impressive and accurate conclusion.

Heh.

Well he does have a point, as you said "Seeding" and "Leaching" are just standard terms used in torrents. It's how they function. All this research has done is tell you want using Bittorent for a week could then just trying to extrapolate from there. And yes i think his conclusions are almost laughably limited.

There is one thing that seems to be glaringly missing here. Torrents are not illegal. I use torrents for patches, The Slip (NIN) was distributed via torrent in it's FLAC form. A torrent is not an automatically illegal thing and therefore you can't really put 'filesharing' in the "These are criminals" Section and to do so fundementally misunderstands both the nature of filesharing and more basically of content.

When people download a torrent they automatically start uploading unless set otherwise. A seeder can simply just do it acidentally overnight. The real people they need to look at are outfits like "SidRow" a cracking group responsible for cracking many different high profile things such as "Assasins Creed 2" and "MW2" and date from the Amigia days in the UK or people like Phara (Former 'head' of NinjaVideo).

These are the real standout players in the Illegal filesharing world, these are the real Robin Hoods of the internet and they are driven not be autruism but by challenge. The 'Warez' side of things has been arround much longer than the internet and most of the big players do date from the same 'playground ROM' era of the Amigia back in another age of ludicrous DRM. They don't even see content they just see a mountian to climb and the most statifying thing for an outfit like SkidRow is to feel they have an adversary to outwit, they are simply in it for the reward of solving a problem or puzzle. They are not pushing as much as pushing BACK.

Thank you for being the first person I've ever seen in one of these piracy discussion threads to point out that 1) torrents aren't illegal and are used for fully legitimate things and 2) most of the people cracking DRM are more interested in the challenge of it than getting/providing stuff for free.

Also to consider. How many people downloading things actually own them? For instance a lot of people don't know how to copy dvds to their computers (especially into a video file like .avi or .mkv) something which is perfectly legitimate. So rather than trying to deal with all that (especially since you need some kind of software to get past the DRM on most games/movies) they just download it from someone who has already done this. Some movies are starting to include digital copies with the dvd but as far as I know these are still DRM laden which can affect what you can play it on/how many copies you can have (what if you have multiple computers or want to copy it to a usb drive to play on something else, for instance).

 

[ionveau]

Its just greed get over yourselves, Did you notice how the price for COD 6 was more then for COD 4?
Remember to the days of your childhood, Remember how the TV ads would tell you to buy this game or that game, Remember pokemon cards? paper that costs less then 0.01 to create selling for 20$ at the store.....

Don't you understand, if the company knows they will sell alot of a product they will boost the price to suck out your money.

Also it annoys me how the AD tell the child "You need to buy this game its the best game ever"

lets jump to WoW, To play this game it will cost you $160 for the whole game and 15$ per month, Why? well any brain washed costumer with no info on the cost of servers will tell you most of the money gose to server up keep and development costs, The truth is for WoW to keep you connected for a whole month it will cost them $0.13 yes this with bandwidth and ETC, Have you seen that Russian free to play game Allods it is a copy of WoW,
Do you want to know why they don't charge 15$ a month? let me tell you, its not popular We the human race are Sheep we don't question things.

Why are outdated laws applied to new media? = Money
Why are we told to think file sharing is bad? = Propaganda
Why is installing an OS on more then 1 computer illegal? = Greed

File sharing laws are the only thing keeping back knowledge Information and overall freedom on the internet.

PS im not a pirate

Yeah because it's not like those servers have maintainence costs or anything.

And if file sharing is "good" then surely so is counterfeiting?

Yes as i said those costs end up being 0.13$ per month/person most likely less

Why would i buy counterfeit products? most of the time they break a day after i get them, they also have nothing to do with file sharing

 

[ionveau]

Its just greed get over yourselves, Did you notice how the price for COD 6 was more then for COD 4?

Inflation [http://lmgtfy.com/?q=inflation]. Or, remember that last raise of yours? Yeah, coders deserve them every now and then too.

Remember pokemon cards? paper that costs less then 0.01 to create selling for 20$ at the store.....

Because art grows on trees, and cards move themselves by drifting on air currents, and sales staff in game stores work for product and the warm, fuzzy feeling they get seeing customers' joyful faces.

File sharing laws are the only thing keeping back knowledge Information and overall freedom on the internet.

Bah. Information may want to be free, but those discovering (or even creating) and distributing it want to pay their bills. I think you need to take a closer look at what goes into creating games and getting them to market, because I think you're missing more than half the story here.

-- Steve the Gay boy

Before i start people that do these kind of responses are just sad

#1
Inflation you say?
The NES sold 20million consoles in its run time while the PS2 sold over 140 million price of the games stayed the same despite the increasing market

#2
Pokemon cards are art? ok bud first of these cards are not hand made they are printed out at a extremely high rate

two these cards are printed the same way as normal playing cards

three
http://www.toysrus.ca/product/index.jsp?productId=4079769
http://www.officedepot.com/a/products/771966/Ativa-4GB-Flip-Top-USB-Flash/
Tell me what you think costs more to create

#3

I dont even care about your golden games, the information im talking about is books educational materiel and etc, Do you know a high school textbook is $80?

Ya school is free unless you want to do night school then its 40$ fee then 80$ for the book

You enjoy your little games they will do nothing for you and frankly i dont care if they all just drop dead,

Its ok defend the people squeezing you dry, or your just trolling me then good show my friend.

-- Robin hood <-- WTF is this? do you walk around saying your name after every sentence?

PS i no pirate

Edit, Wait did you just say coders deserve them too? ok let me explain how a job works,

You come in you do it everyday day after day, If your a factory worker and you make a product that sells 900% more then normal you get a Christmas boost at the end of the year if you where i good little slave,

Developers same thing they come in they do the job, your talking like the money is only going to the workers all that extra money goes to the boss the greedy soulless man upstairs thinking up new ways to squeeze money from you


Again if your a troll good job

 

[Anton P. Nym]

-- Steve the Gay boy

Well, that's mature.

Inflation you say?
The NES sold 20million consoles in its run time while the PS2 sold over 140 million price of the games stayed the same despite the increasing market

Hardware costs go down with time as the R&D costs get paid off, the production becomes more automated and so the labour costs per-unit drop, and components get cheaper. This doesn't work for software costs, as you need more labour to create higher-resolution art and more code-intensive game engines (meaning more people working more hours, raising instead of lowering labour costs) in order to meet the expectations of gamers.

I'd also like to point out that very few people (call it "none", at least in comparison) pirate hardware... your argument is invali- irrelevant.

Pokemon cards are art? ok bud first of these cards are not hand made they are printed out at a extremely high rate

two these cards are printed the same way as normal playing cards

Each card is not hand-made, but someone had to create each pictures that appears on the cards. There are how many different cards now, somewhere in the low thousands I think? That's a lot of pictures people did make by hand. Yes, the cards are printed out in the millions, I agree; they're not truly rarities. But each picture that appears on a Magic&trade; card cost several-hundred bucks* to make, and the art costs for that game alone climb into the 7-digit range.

I dont even care about your golden games, the information im talking about is books educational materiel and etc, Do you know a high school textbook is $80?

Irrelevant in a discussion of game piracy.

-- Steve

*I use Magic as I know some folks who did freelance work for WotC back in the day. I don't know anyone who worked on Pokemon, so I don't know their rates.

 

[ionveau]

-- Steve the Gay boy

Well, that's mature.

Inflation you say?
The NES sold 20million consoles in its run time while the PS2 sold over 140 million price of the games stayed the same despite the increasing market

Hardware costs go down with time as the R&D costs get paid off, the production becomes more automated and so the labour costs per-unit drop, and components get cheaper. This doesn't work for software costs, as you need more labour to create higher-resolution art and more code-intensive game engines (meaning more people working more hours, raising instead of lowering labour costs) in order to meet the expectations of gamers.

I'd also like to point out that very few people (call it "none", at least in comparison) pirate hardware... your argument is invali- irrelevant.

Pokemon cards are art? ok bud first of these cards are not hand made they are printed out at a extremely high rate

two these cards are printed the same way as normal playing cards

Each card is not hand-made, but someone had to create each pictures that appears on the cards. There are how many different cards now, somewhere in the low thousands I think? That's a lot of pictures people did make by hand. Yes, the cards are printed out in the millions, I agree; they're not truly rarities. But each picture that appears on a Magic? card cost several-hundred bucks* to make, and the art costs for that game alone climb into the 7-digit range.

I dont even care about your golden games, the information im talking about is books educational materiel and etc, Do you know a high school textbook is $80?

Irrelevant in a discussion of game piracy.

-- Steve The Gay boy

*I use Magic as I know some folks who did freelance work for WotC back in the day. I don't know anyone who worked on Pokemon, so I don't know their rates.

The title reads file shearer therefore any data file or program


As for the pictures costing 700$ to make...well......Can i pay a 7 year old 5 candy's an hour to draw me this "art" so i can later sell it for as you said "several-hundred bucks"

http://www.pokemon.com/us/trading-cards/database/ex-series/ex14/5/

http://www.pokemon.com/us/trading-cards/database/ex-series/ex14/7/

http://www.pokemon.com/us/trading-cards/database/ex-series/ex14/8/

http://www.pokemon.com/us/trading-cards/database/ex-series/ex14/16/