Film Studios Seeking Complete Block of Newzbin2 in the UK 231
superglaze writes "Having got BT, one of the biggest ISPs in the UK, to block the Newzbin2 Usenet site, the Motion Picture Association is now trying to get the same result from all the other major service providers in the country. As this is likely to go through, it won't be long before most people in the UK will be unable to visit file-sharing sites at all, without using a proxy, VPN, or special client."
They can block all they want (Score:5, Insightful)
At the end of the day, they won't be surprised when the ticket sales for the utter crap that they call movies doesn't go up one bit. People who download movies usually cannot afford to go and see them, or refuse to pay the ridiculous prices to see them. Cinemas in the UK are a joke. 7 quid for a coke and popcorn. 8 quid to get in. Take a family of 4 to a cinema and you are out 60 quid ($90 ish). It's a joke. Just to sit there for 90 minutes and watch utter crap. Make cinema affordable for families again and piracy will go down very quickly.
Re:They can block all they want (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:They can block all they want (Score:5, Insightful)
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"when my living room is much nicer than the local cinema, it makes very little incentive to go to the cinema"
Also the lack of the 300 teenagers, checking their twitter messages twice per minute on their cells in a dark room is not negligible.
Re:They can block all they want (Score:5, Insightful)
And renting the DVD is even cheaper. I pay less for an all-I-can-watch, 2 disks at home at once (becoming 3 next week for the same price) rental subscription as I'd pay for going to the cinema twice a month. I spent about £100 on my 5.1 speakers ten years ago, and about £150 on my projector four years ago. I can watch films on a comfy sofa with whatever food or drink I want and pause it when I want. If I want to watch a film with someone else, it costs the same amount, while going to the cinema will cost twice as much.
The studios delay the DVD releases because they will cannibalise cinema profits. They don't seem to understand that this means that, given the choice, people would rather watch the DVD than go to the cinema. In any sane business, this would mean that they'd release the DVD first, giving their customers what they want. Instead, they intentionally don't give customers what they want and then blame piracy for their profits being lower than they want.
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Cinema is dead... it just hasn't realised it yet... personall
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Cinema is dead... it just hasn't realised it yet...
Apparently they like losing money then. Someone should tell all those people Ive seen at the movies that theyre not supposed to be there.
Are you arguing that Movie theatres all are losing money, and just havent realized it?
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What, no crying children, people whispering or candy wrapper/bags crackling? How boring.
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When I can buy a DVD for the price of a cinema ticket + parking + snacks and when my living room is much nicer than the local cinema, it makes very little incentive to go to the cinema.
Expect that to change. Pay per view DVD is in our future. Why else do you think all players are connected to the network? ( 'additional content' my ass )
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Expect that to change. Pay per view DVD is in our future.
They already tried that [wikipedia.org] more than a decade ago. It didn't go over too well.
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When I can buy a DVD for the price of a cinema ticket + parking + snacks
Cinema ticket is about $8. Parking is usually around $2-- this is in Chinatown, in Washington DC-- and assumes youre not a moron using $20 garage parking. Elsewhere (suburbs) its usually free, and many many many places do it for free with validation.
And are you seriously comparing the price of an outing with parking and food to the price of a dvd? Thats not even close to fair.
Movie theatres are expensive as others have said, and I generally prefer to get the DVD and avoid the price + hassle, but it reall
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I'll be honest, I don't want to pay for most movies because the paid versions suck compared to the free ones. I'll wait until I can see them for free on TV or via a high quality download (no cam rubbish). Cinemas are not nice places and there is always some twat commentating a couple of rows behind you. DVDs are okay but a chore to rip and I haven't even bothered with Bluray.
The real problem as I see it is that there is no easy way to make a simple payment for a movie that doesn't involve some kind of excha
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It makes up for his goofy accent and regular use of nautical vernacular, despite never having *seen* a body of water larger than the public pool.
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Yeah but is getting the newest Harry Potter film for the kids really worth the 2 hour rant about governmental spies and the New World Order?
I don't think I can stomach another forced viewing of Loose Change...
Re:They can block all they want (Score:5, Informative)
It's 8 quid if you happen to live outside london, it costs a lot more in london...
Add to that, the conditions... Of the cinemas i've been to over the years, most are smelly, dirty, poor climate control (either too hot or too cold), uncomfortable seats, seats too close together so you knock elbows etc etc...
I also never understood why they sell the noisiest possible food (crisps and popcorn) at cinemas, people munching away on this stuff is noisy and detracts from the movie!
Contrast that to cinemas in some asian countries, where they have to compete against a much higher level of piracy, the prices are not only much cheaper but the experience much better to boot.
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I also never understood why they sell the noisiest possible food (crisps and popcorn) at cinemas, people munching away on this stuff is noisy and detracts from the movie!
I also don't understand why they think you'll consume an entire litre of fizzy drink during a single movie. I've never seen anywhere else selling that much beverage at one time outside the Oktoberfest
Re:They can block all they want (Score:4, Interesting)
I also don't understand why they think you'll consume an entire litre of fizzy drink during a single movie.
American influence, I think. I don't remember much from my single trip to the cinema in the USA, many years ago, except that the staff wondered why the British children didn't want any food or drink. We lasted the duration of Finding Nemo with no ill effects, and without consuming 175% of a child's RDA of sugar in a single drink (figure for a supersized "42 oz" (1.25L) coke).
At McDonalds (figures from the websites):
- A "large" drink in the UK is 0.5L, a "medium" about 0.4L, a "small" 0.25L (Germany has the same sizes).
- A "large" drink in the US is 0.95L, a "medium" is 0.62L, a "small" 0.47L, and a "child" 0.35L.
The US "child" drink, the smallest available, is about the same as a UK/German "medium".
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Hmm...
500ml of Coke in a bottle has 53g of sugar http://www.coca-cola.co.uk/brands/coca-cola.html [coca-cola.co.uk]
500ml of Coke at UK McDonalds has 53g of sugar, so there's no ice http://www.mcdonalds.co.uk/food/nutrition/nutrition-counter.mcd [mcdonalds.co.uk]
(They obviously serve it with ice, but that's not considered part of the drink for the nutrition info.)
32floz = 946ml of Coke in US McDonalds has 86g of sugar, so there is some ice / extra water (otherwise it would be 100g of sugar). 86g of sugar is 811ml worth of Coke in a bottle --
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It's so they can justify charging you a fiver for it. Because no-one else sells drinks that size there is nothing to make a direct comparison with.
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Never seen 1-liter bottled soft drinks?
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I also don't understand why they think you'll consume an entire litre of fizzy drink during a single movie. I've never seen anywhere else selling that much beverage at one time outside the Oktoberfest
Fizzy drinks are very cheap to make, especially if you have a machine on site. Obviously, they'd like to relieve you of as much money as possible so they sell huge quantities at high prices, but lower price per unit volume that if you bough them in 330ml cans.
The customer needs to get up to use the loo severa
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There is some social aspect to watching a movie together, but a cinemas destroys even this. Politeness dictates the movie be watched in silence, or at most a whisper, making it impossible to talk to friends - and if you can't talk during a movie, you might as well watch it alone.
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Why do you feel the need to talk during a movie in the first place? Watch it and talk about it after!
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10: BAN INTERNET SITES
20: print OUR PROFITS AREN'T GOING UP! WE MUST HAVE MISSED SOMETHING!
30: GOTO 10
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(Sometimes, the Filters kinda piss me off. Blah blah blah text to counter the yelling filter blah blah.)
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. People who download movies usually cannot afford to go and see them,
Ba-loney.
Every single person I know who downloads movies has a full time job, a vehicle, a cellphone, pays insurance, goes out regularly, etc. And youre telling me they cant afford a movie?
Being against IP or the RIAA or the MPAA doesnt excuse spouting flat out lies. Unless you have a source to back up that rather preposterous statement you made?
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He didn't actually say "all," so no, he's not telling you that they can't afford a movie.
Still, I'd like to know how he knows that they "usually" can't afford it.
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Make cinema affordable for families again and piracy will go down very quickly.
Don't compare to the cost of taking a family of four to the movies, compare to the cost of renting a movie on iTunes. It's not the spending of £60 that is the problem, it is the unwillingness to pay any money at all.
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Or Newzbin2, since they've already worked around the block with their own client.
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Yes. There's no possible way that you could be wrong. You're 100% right.
All pirates are greedy (hasty generalizations are fantastic) and think the exact same thing. Their moral code isn't the exact same as yours; therefore, what they're doing is "bad."
If there were less piracy, studios would be able to take more risks, and could afford to put out more high-concept movies.
Citation needed. Or did you just peer into an alternate reality where there are no pirates?
the article (Score:2, Interesting)
having just read that, it seems, there is no need for smaller ISPs that resell the connection of BT to be blocked (which they wont be it seems).
now, if there is one idea we can steal from patent trolls (if they didn't patent it yet) its making shell companies with no real atributes.
how about making smaller ISPs that do nothing but resell the connection of BT, if they get sued, you drop them and offer the clients to swap to another shell company with no added costs, under the same terms.
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Sounds like there is room for small ISPs to resell the big guy's bandwidth but with their own DNS server.
sensationalist (Score:2)
it won't be long before most people in the UK will be unable to visit file-sharing sites at all, without using a proxy, VPN, or special client.
That's like saying you soon won't be able to leave your own house - unless you use a door or window. If the Chinese government cannot filter the internet effectively the UK government will have no hope.
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It's not the UK government, it's the ISPs who are being forced into it by the Record Labels. BT, Virgin, etc. don't want to filter these sites, so they're not going to care if they do a particularly poor job of it.
I'm curious though, as far as I'm aware, this is done at the DNS level - anyone on BT know what happens when you use OpenDNS?
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That's... not exactly true. The UK government forced all these ISPs to add the hardware to be able to filter websites so that they could block child porn - previously they didn't have the ability to do it - and then the record labels saw this and realised they could force them to block sites like Newzbin2 too.
It's not DNS-based either; they insert a transparent proxy between their users and the IP addresses that the websites use and actually filter requests.
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Or a 64gb micro-SD card, in a smart phone, acting as a WiFi access point. Who needs the internet when you have your own network?
The kids are already doing this. It only takes one person to obtain the naughty files.
Files will become hot-property, school currency, and the kids with the most on offer will become the most popular.
Well done UK Gov. With this and your Channel Islands Tax Loophole closure, you'll have Hollywood making election winning donations for years to come.
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In 2001 not so many people had broadband internet access, and one of the kids in my class downloaded films, burned them to CD-R, and sold them at a small profit (about £1 per CD). One of my friends downloaded music and gave it away to his friends on CD.
If filesharing sites are blocked, it could limit downloading films and music to those who know how to get round the block. The result can be the same, except according to the GP, the sharing at school now happens using an SD card in a smartphone and Wi
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It works. When I was a pupil, it was the height of the pokemon craze. I supplied copies of no$gba and roms on floppy, site rips of the pokedex, episode guides, even whole episodes in realmedia format via spanned ZIP archives. Made me quite popular, so long as the flow of data was kept up. Then the internet came along, and suddenly noone needed my services.
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Files will become hot-property, school currency, and the kids with the most on offer will become the most popular.
This. I had the good fortune of being in school when Napster launched, as well as being one of the very few kids with a high speed connection and a CD burner. I made a decent amount of money selling custom mix discs to kids I went to school with, their parents, even a few teachers were buying discs from me. It got to the point where I was getting so many orders that I was literally spending all of my free time burning CD's.
The rebirth of Sneakernet is at hand...
Clowns (Score:2)
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Pointless (Score:2)
And doubtless it'll be just as effective as BT's blocking has been...
Though I suspect that it's less the awesome skill of the people circumventing it and more that BT have almost certainly found the cheapest way to minimally comply with the court order making it trivial to bypass and the other ISPs will probably do the same.
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I applaud this. (Score:3)
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Tentatively agreed. I hope this will lead to more people defaulting to encrypted and proxied connections.
Especially if an Ubuntu distro already set up to do this becomes widely used.
Why Newsbin2? (Score:2)
I'm curious - why did they go after Newsbin2? Why not one of the main sites, like Piratebay (I know they're next, but you'd have thought they'd have gone after the big fish first). Unless Newsbin2 is a bigger site than I gave it credit for. I've never really heard of it, even from chatter amongst heavy filesharers and newsgroup users - nzbmatrix, binsearch, etc. all seem a lot more popular.
What did Newsbin2 do to specifically piss off this label?
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Newsbin were originally a UK based site. They were forced offshore, then they went for blocking it.
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But they didn't go after Newsbin2 directly, they went after BT to BLOCK Newsbin2.
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Well, that looks like a load of tosh to me, sorry.
And seeing as you mentioned it, how was what they did so unlike what Google does?
Bittorrent over I2P (Score:2)
There needs to be a mass migration to this. It will be difficult, similar to the IPv4 to IPv6 transition, but it will be completely invulnerable to interference. TPB should take the lead by setting up a parallel darknet tracker & torrent site that runs on I2P, that would make it easy for users to start running multiple clients and ease the transition to I2P torrents. Once complete anonymity is possible, uploading will become much more popular, maybe there could be a quick interface for re-seeding old to
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Throwing the baby out with the bathwater (Score:2)
Or, more precisely for us un the U.S., banning guns because they kill people.
I'm going way out on a limb here, but in the U.S., I suspect there are many more incidents of crimes committed with the aid of a handgun than there are incidents of self-defense usign a handgun. Banning guns isn't the solution for several reasons, the most salient being that criminals will still have guns from any source willing to sell them, while their victims will not.
Forcing British ISPs to block Newzbin2 is the equivalent of
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As a Usenet user since the 90s, I resent that remark. :)
This will lead to the end of the Internet (Score:2)
The once united global net will be fractured into small national networks if these legislations spread.
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In a word, no.... What it *will* lead to is more and more regulation, until only big corporations or govt. related agencies can send/receive international traffic. You forget, the people with all the money and power (multinational corporations and government + govt. contractors) still find the Internet very useful for communications among their own entities. They won't allow it to be disassembled into small national networks, unless they're granted exceptions.
Bring on the darknets (Score:4)
The industry can't see an arms-race when it's staring them in the face.
This will escalate until file-sharing is done over invite-only darknets. Best
of luck filtering fully encrypted data streams that make a jump or two
across national borders. A DNS blacklist is one thing, but forcing ISPs to
engage in highly costly traffic analysis is something they will fight tooth and nail.
Workarounds (Score:2)
...using a proxy, VPN, or special client.
So there are your first 3 workarounds already. Tells you how effective this is all going to be. Nothing more than harder to detect when it's actually happening now.
Because the current block is working so well (Score:2)
As highlighted by RevK from AAISP in a recent blog post on the stupidity of the blocking [www.me.uk]
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And while you're at it, subscribe to Slashdot so you don't see the ads any more. Remember - you have to spend money to save money!
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Or, since this is about the UK, only watch the BBC (which has no ads)
With the amount of content the BBC puts out, it should be possible to completly avoid content that makes these MPAA scumbags money.
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Wait... so I was being brainwashed by advertisements all along!? That must be why I instantly forgot about the commercials soon after they appeared and never actually bought anything I saw in the advertisements. What a sneaky plan they have.
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If you download TV shows from unlicensed sources you will see there is no ads.
Maybe that is the problem? It is not really about copyrights but about losing viewers for the ads?
Maybe, but what is the industry going to do if someone manages to invent a box that you attach to your TV, that can record all your shows, let you watch them later, and lets you skip past the commercials? Hypothetically, of course.
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No, instead they'll just sue the fuck out of you [wikipedia.org].
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Ah yes, the classical "slippery slope" argument. The problem being that we tend to stop sliding down the slope as soon as the illegal activities run out. Which means everything after hate speech (unless you are trying to do something idiotic like incite a riot or threatening to murder a doctor).
I was a bit concerned in this case because Usenet was involved, which has more legal activity than (say Pirate Bay). Then I looked at the site itself. It is about indexing pirated material. So I'm sorry, but I h
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as soon as the illegal activities run out.
The great thing about the law is that it never changes as it becomes easier to enforce new, more oppressive rules.
Especially in the UK, no advantage was taken of the improvement in computing and communications to create all sorts of draconian surveillance laws which could not even have been dreamt about by, say, former East Germany.
Right?
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No the problem is the slope needs to provide enough momentum to get up the next hill. Child porn-- Huge. File sharing-- Not as big, but big enough to argue, with big supporters to help. Hate speech-- hard to argue against, not huge, starting to hit the trough.
At a point you need to convince people that something like Abortion is grotesque, an abomination to the moral fiber of society, etc., if you want to get that blocked. An up-hill battle, and one that needs to start on the way down. The momentum fr
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In a sense, I agree. You won't find me arguing the moment that they want to block child porn and many forms of hate speech. Keep in mind that all of these acts constitute criminal activities (even, in some cases, copyright infringement).
Beyond that, I don't share your confidence that the slippery slope will continue. There are many losses of freedom that society simply will not tolerate and, even if society did, there are civil liberties organizations that will step up to the ball and fight those battles
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There are many losses of freedom that society simply will not tolerate and, even if society did, there are civil liberties organizations that will step up to the ball and fight those battles.
We here at the TSA whole-heartedly agree, and can attest to the viciousness of people trying to pass airport checkpoints without having their boobs x-ray-goggled and their scrotums squeezed. It was a humbling experience for us when the ACLU obtained a court order forcing us to cease all operations not shown to improve security, both for specific complaints such as humiliation over naked x-rays and groping and for more general complaints about using non-issues as a platform to force travelers into ridiculo
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Never argued with a pro-lifer before? That's about typical for them. They tend to use holocaust comparisons a lot, but they usually believe abortion is the greater crime.
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The problem being that we tend to stop sliding down the slope as soon as the illegal activities run out.
So corruption doesn't exist?
Which means everything after hate speech
Not hate speech itself, though? Good. I was almost afraid that someone would say something mean to me! Better ban that!
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Then child porn. Then hate speech. Then speech to create political unrest. Then pro-abortion speech. Then pro-Republican speech.
Um... if you read TFA then you'll see it's actually "First child porn, then file sharing". The fact that you have child porn on that list as if it's something people should be able to access is a little disturbing too.
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Are you suggesting that the government should stop people "being able to access" child porn? Be precise in your language and your argument.
Re:First file sharing (Score:5, Insightful)
One of the cases the was on Slashdot a few weeks ago was a catholic priest. Some of the pictures he had were just photograph of (clothed) children with their crotches in the centre of the frame. These were counted as child porn (not to defend the individual in question - there was also evidence that he was molesting the children, but focussing on the pictures rather than the molestation seems wrong).
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but focusing on the pictures rather than the molestation seems wrong
Are we being conditioned to consider the thought as the crime, rather than the act?
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Child porn is not a reason to allow the government to blatantly mandate block lists for the Internet. Child porn is a reason for the government to monitor such things, but also to arrange stings and traps and to go put an end to human trafficking and to try to stop the child molesters.
The current government line is that each time another person views an image of child porn, that child is victimized again. It's one more victimization of that child for one more person to see it. The current law states t
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shhhh, you're disrupting their world view that the USA is the world. you might hurt they're ability to further broad brush over topics....
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Brits know what Republicans are.
Yeah, I'm not sure that's universally true, actually. We know who your president is, but I suspect at least 50% of UK citizens couldn't tell you which party he represents.
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We know who your president is, but I suspect at least 50% of UK citizens couldn't tell you which party he represents.
That's because they're pretty much the same fucking party in all but name...
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> but I suspect at least 50% of UK citizens couldn't tell you which party he represents.
That's not because we're stupid. That's just because he's very hard to distinguish from the last terrorist in power.
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Amateurism is way better than the utter shit that Hollywood shits out 98% of the time. Your industry needs to be purged, I welcome its death and rebirth.
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That's just it. Everyone cries for it to be reborn - but the outcome of that scenario could result in something worse, not something better. I'm not saying changes don't need to be made, but the whole industry dying off will probably not happen.
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It'll be hard for the majority of those working in the creative industries, but we braindead code monkeys, consultants, administrators and documentators create as much content as you do (and coding, conceptual work and finding nasty bugs is creative work), but we write a single bill for it, and are done with it. We don't expect to be paid for the rest of our lives and our heirs for an additional 70 years for it.
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I never listened to the White Album, how should I know? Any famous songs on it?
Re:This is good (Score:5, Insightful)
Sorry, my points have all been spent.
You might want to pick up a newspaper sometime (if they still in print) because the world has changed a little bit in the last several decades.
There have been some recent developments that you might find interesting, such as the rise of "the internet", "smart phones", "i-things", "unemployment", and "economic uncertainty".
In reading, you might also learn that most of us don't have infinite incomes. Additionally, at the risk of offending some camps, all businesses can't continue to always increase profits for an infinite amount of time.
So the average person has less money to spend on entertainment and more places to spend it, then it seems pretty likely that certain "creative industries" can feel the pinch.
You are in the "creative industry", can't you be more creative than using piracy as a scapegoat?
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Actually, the "average person" has plenty to spend on a computer, smartphone, iPod, iPod dock, digital camera, preposterous "Beats" headphones, internet connection and download allowance (for all those cracks), etc etc.
Which doesn't mean that they have money to spend on every single movie or game that they want. Their money is limited (especially after buying all of that, some of which they may need for work).
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