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I do believe it's quite easy to make a password activated file ALA Itunes/giftcard style. Using off-site activation to trace files on the web. And money for this would come from the purchaser of the schematic.

Its not a hard concept and it's been done before many times with great success.

and for every great success, tools have been made to remove the copy protection in these sorts of distribution methods.

Doctadeth wrote:So Biccat, rather than distributing their schematics in a fashion that would mean that people would have exact copies at a price, which would ALSO dissuade people from pirating because if leaks occur, GW would have the people who bought that product within that timeframe.

Like you said, piracy is always going to occur. However, if you make piracy more expensive less people will do it. But if you make piracy less expensive, more people will do it.

Allowing people to print at home and releasing the schematics actually makes piracy less expensive because there's no connection between the piracy and the physical product - my legitimately-obtained printed Dreadnought will look and cost identical to your pirated printed Dreadnought. The only difference is how we acquired the instructions.

However, if you make a mold of the Dreadnought and reproduce it, you could have errors in casting, use an inferior material with less definition, or have a product that is less valuable on the secondary market. All of these are costs (in addition to the mold-making process) that you bear and the legitimate purchaser doesn't bear. Same applies to 3d printers.

Ergo, while piracy may occur, it is actually more expensive to pirate and reproduce non-digital copies than it is to pirate digital copies.

As another example: if I wanted to pirate an e-book, it would be very easy and inexpensive and the piracy would be virtually undetectable. Try doing that with a paperback.

Canadian 5th wrote:Copyright is becoming a bit of an anachronism with the advent of the information age. How do you stop file sharing when its backbone is made up of movable servers and dispersed uploaders and downloading peers? The answer is simply that as with the war on drugs stopping it completely is impossible and even just attempting to stem the tide is so costly and manpower intensive as to be a futile effort.

The fact of the matter is that GW can't win this fight by throwing money at it and trying to sue anonymous people on the internet. Suing or trying to take legal action against a website has already shown to be spotty if it's hosted outside of a country interested in stemming piracy. After all, TPB has survived many attempts to have it taken down and still hasn't given an inch.

People need to understand that a capitalist society based on owning ideas and expecting a constantly growing market isn't sustainable or even desirable. I'm not saying that I know the better answer, but increasing levels of automation are already costing jobs and with ever increasing technology we could see robots more and more outside of the factory doing simple tasks like paving roads and laying sidewalks. Once that sort of thing hits so many people will be out of work that we'll have to rethink things anyway.

----

On a side note bones and other tissue has been grown in the lab and there is a lot of research going into artificial meat as well as reprocessing waste into consumable food. Thus I don't see the idea of 'printing' food as that far fetched, especially if it takes less land use than ranching or other forms of commercial farming. I do however think we're a fairly long way off from seeing vat grown meat next to a cut of beef in the grocery store.

You have no idea how nice it is to see someone else with a grasp of the situation that extends beyond their own nose and the next decade.

As for vat-meat, we may be a decade or two away from prime whole cuts, but you'll certainly be seeing it on shelves in sausage/burger/etc form fairly soon. Even the stuff the labs are producing now is technically edible, it's just not been declared as such by the authorities, and it isn't appetising straight out of the bioreactor(hence why it'll begin life in sausages and burgers, where its flavour and texture can be manipulated to some extent after it's been grown).

People can bleat about "piracy"(which is a ludicrous term in and of itself) all they want, our choices are to use emerging technologies for the benefit of all mankind, or engage in some kind of monstrous Luddite Corporatism; there are already commercial-scale 3D printers which can manufacture an object with multiple moving parts, from the ground up and fully assembled, in less than an hour, without the touch of a single human hand. Does anyone honestly think we'd have iTunes, or Steam, or Pandora, or Last.fm etc etc etc today if not for Napster, Limewire, TPB? Of course not; you'd still be forking over £15-18 for a 10-track album just to get the one track you actually like. People like to claim that capitalism drives innovation, but that's increasing not the case, rather it stifles it, because once a commercial entity reaches a critical mass of wealth and influence -as the music and movie industries have done- the system breaks down, and it become more profitable for them to expend tens of millions buying up patents on innovative new technologies in order to bury them in the deepest darkest filing cabinet they can find, and tens of millions more to buy the votes of politicians.

As to the dreadnaught itself; as with music and film "piracy", even if 3D printing was capable of allowing non-business users to get a perfect 1-1 copy right now, which it isn't, it's nothing new, it's simply an issue of scale. VHS, cassettes, making moulds for your own use - torrents, napster, 3D printing; fundamentally the act is the same, a copying of information, and fundamentally sharing is the same, whether it's you loaning a friend a book, movie, or a press-mould of a Marine shoulderpad, or if it's you uploading digital copies of that same information to the internet - scale is the only difference. We should be embracing 3D printing and technologies like it, because it offers us the chance to do something that was unthinkable even a decade ago; end scarcity.

Emerett wrote:Please expand nk, citations and a example of your expertise would be great.

http://www.copyright.gov/

Adam LongWalker wrote:

Emerett wrote:Did the Games Workshop FBI Strike Team instantly burst in and shoot his dog while arresting him?

No the Thought Police did

he stopped playing at that store, most likely going to the other LGS in town, which is all gak.

We should be embracing 3D printing and technologies like it

So, again, why ever buy a model again if we embrace 3D printing?

Is this really a CHEAPER alternative?

Only if you were going to buy £1000+ worth of dreadnoughts.

Mr Hyena wrote:

People need to understand that a capitalist society based on owning ideas and expecting a constantly growing market isn't sustainable or even desirable. I'm not saying that I know the better answer, but increasing levels of automation are already costing jobs and with ever increasing technology we could see robots more and more outside of the factory doing simple tasks like paving roads and laying sidewalks. Once that sort of thing hits so many people will be out of work that we'll have to rethink things anyway.

But the problem is, the supposed counter to piracy requires money. How can companies like GW pay for counter-piracy measures (such as further improving models/implementing and maintaining a schematics system etc) when people will be able to easily print out high-quality copies of the models? (These systems need money)

Its a downwards spiral unless something is done. We need a controlled internet.

No, as controlling the internet isn't actually feasible for any non-omniscient government body. People had plans in place to deal with SOPA/PIPA should the worst happen with that, and generally the internet is pretty adaptable. Thus, just as policing liquor during prohibition didn't work and the wars on drugs is a waste of lives and money, any attempt to control the internet will be an expensive failure with limited results shown for it.

Instead, we need to accept that the system as we've built it is flawed and can't remain in the face easy information sharing. Look at how many jobs a dumb machine like a self checkout has cost, or the robots in the auto industry that forced the unions to make insane demands that ensured they needed to be bailed out; we also have a large, but non-related issue, the banks. While the bailouts (for both banks and car makers) needed to happen, how long do we want to be chained to the greedy sociopaths that run multinational corporations?

When a robot can build a house faster and cheaper than a construction company, who would still hire a man? When the government looks to have roads repaved, would they rather pay some shovel leaner, or a few guys to make sure the bots don't break down? Once this level of change starts where do we replace those lost jobs? The answer will either be with more low wage service industry employment which will only grow the wealth gap, or they will simply be marginalized and told to learn to program robots.

So what do you do when men are replaced by machines and less and less people can find work? If you're a growth based multinational corporation you slash works and reap record profits while telling people that if they work hard they too can rise to the top. If your a government with lobbyists in every ear you pass some token laws, but not much more because even in many countries with good safety nets people resent paying to keep people who don't work going. There is no third option the way things stand, more people will slip down and the world's depression and debt scares will simply become ever more and more likely.

Where does the line get drawn, legally or ethically, between GW's policy of 'scratchbuilt models are fine and legal' and 'this very limited production model a bit like ours is illegal', I wonder?

Miraclefish wrote:Where does the line get drawn, legally or ethically, between GW's policy of 'scratchbuilt models are fine and legal' and 'this very limited production model a bit like ours is illegal', I wonder?

That particular line on the sand is currently being drawn with GW vs Chapterhouse.

...Presumably drawn with a child's thigh bone dipped in the blood of the innocent!

Wait, GW went after a website for doing something illegal. When their whole operation is technically illegal
Say what you want but they have gall.
Or a nail in their head.
its probably both.

Okay I'll bite. Why is GWs whole operation illegal?

I appreciate it is best to hide things in plain site sometimes. But a company with £120M turnover has something to go after, I'm gonna guess that if it was illegal there would be people taking chunks of that.

Mr Hyena wrote:But the problem is, the supposed counter to piracy requires money. How can companies like GW pay for counter-piracy measures (such as further improving models/implementing and maintaining a schematics system etc) when people will be able to easily print out high-quality copies of the models? (These systems need money)

Its a downwards spiral unless something is done. We need a controlled internet.

The answer is simple: they should change their outdated business model and stop whining. Anyone who makes a profit in a capitalist society has tacitly agreed to abide by the principles of that society: survival of the fittest. If piracy means the end of your business model, then your business model is going to fail. It's as simple as that.

Thanks to the US in recent years, capitalism has become synonymous with draconian copyright laws, but they are not actually one and the same. Capitalism simply means the pursuit of wealth within a competitive market. However, many companies (GW included) have tried to make their own company more competitive not by improving it, but by preventing other companies from competing in the same market. That is not Capitalism. That is legislating in a monopoly; which is a concept that is anathema to Capitalism.

The fact of the matter is that piracy will not put anyone out of business if they don't operate under a business model that deserves to be put out of business. Piracy merely pulls the plug on the life support system of US Intellectual Property laws; and if a company is only still in business due to these laws, then the instant that company dies, a new and better one will replace it. Why? Because that is one of the core tenets of what Capitalism actually is.

Piracy will not harm the means of production. It will only force companies to hobble the salaries of those at the top of the corporate ladder. The reason for this is because production salaries will always be as low as is legally possible, as will actual production costs. So, if piracy is able to pose a legitimate threat to a business model, the easiest way to stem the piracy threat is to adjust the selling price per unit so that it operates as a function of the product's quality at a level that people are willing to pay for through legitimate means. (for example, the polarized opposite of Finecast) However, if this means dropping the prices significantly, and there is no way to decrease the cost of production further, then the company will simply have to pay its heads less. Because corporate salaries is where most of a corporation's gross revenue actually goes. Let's take Apple as an example. Your $700 iPad is made in China by workers that earn about $0.35 per hour. If that iPad was made in the USA by workers that earn at least the minimum wage, then your iPad would cost about $735 dollars. However, if Apple eliminated the salaries of its top 20 employees, then your iPad would likely cost about $450 (this figure allows for Apple to make a 20% gross profit on each unit and still pay everyone in the company below a boardroom level their current wage), even if it was made in the USA.

So Mr Hyena, I cannot help but simultaneously laugh at the irony and recoil in the horror of your comment, considering that in your concern about a downward spiral you have suggested censoring the greatest free speech tool in the history of mankind.

notprop wrote:Okay I'll bite. Why is GWs whole operation illegal?

I appreciate it is best to hide things in plain site sometimes. But a company with £120M turnover has something to go after, I'm gonna guess that if it was illegal there would be people taking chunks of that.

I mean the site itself. Armed police couldnt stop the site. a cease and desist from GW wont.

azazel the cat wrote:The fact of the matter is that piracy will not put anyone out of business if they don't operate under a business model that deserves to be put out of business. Piracy merely pulls the plug on the life support system of US Intellectual Property laws; and if a company is only still in business due to these laws, then the instant that company dies, a new and better one will replace it. Why? Because that is one of the core tenets of what Capitalism actually is.

Question:

Without intellectual property rights, how do authors and music artists get compensated for their work?

biccat wrote:

azazel the cat wrote:The fact of the matter is that piracy will not put anyone out of business if they don't operate under a business model that deserves to be put out of business. Piracy merely pulls the plug on the life support system of US Intellectual Property laws; and if a company is only still in business due to these laws, then the instant that company dies, a new and better one will replace it. Why? Because that is one of the core tenets of what Capitalism actually is.

Question:

Without intellectual property rights, how do authors and music artists get compensated for their work?

Stoping piracy is a pipe dream. All you can do is build good rapport with your customers and show them you will do hand stands for them and make good products.
Gw only does one of those things.

biccat wrote:

Doctadeth wrote:So Biccat, rather than distributing their schematics in a fashion that would mean that people would have exact copies at a price, which would ALSO dissuade people from pirating because if leaks occur, GW would have the people who bought that product within that timeframe.

Like you said, piracy is always going to occur. However, if you make piracy more expensive less people will do it. But if you make piracy less expensive, more people will do it.

Allowing people to print at home and releasing the schematics actually makes piracy less expensive because there's no connection between the piracy and the physical product - my legitimately-obtained printed Dreadnought will look and cost identical to your pirated printed Dreadnought. The only difference is how we acquired the instructions.

However, if you make a mold of the Dreadnought and reproduce it, you could have errors in casting, use an inferior material with less definition, or have a product that is less valuable on the secondary market. All of these are costs (in addition to the mold-making process) that you bear and the legitimate purchaser doesn't bear. Same applies to 3d printers.

Ergo, while piracy may occur, it is actually more expensive to pirate and reproduce non-digital copies than it is to pirate digital copies.

As another example: if I wanted to pirate an e-book, it would be very easy and inexpensive and the piracy would be virtually undetectable. Try doing that with a paperback.

Intersting points you raise.

Except they made piracy cheaper with the embargo. Now, people will sell sprues as used parts out of the box, encouraging people to clone them with inferior materials much more easily whereas people won't go to the effort of copying the box.

biccat wrote:

azazel the cat wrote:The fact of the matter is that piracy will not put anyone out of business if they don't operate under a business model that deserves to be put out of business. Piracy merely pulls the plug on the life support system of US Intellectual Property laws; and if a company is only still in business due to these laws, then the instant that company dies, a new and better one will replace it. Why? Because that is one of the core tenets of what Capitalism actually is.

Question:

Without intellectual property rights, how do authors and music artists get compensated for their work?

Go ask Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails.

Not coincidentally, these two bands also kick butt on stage. You know, how bands used to get paid.

I do understand where you're coming from (it's you, biccat, who is the IP lawyer, right?) but the truth of the matter is that record companies cried about how cassette tapes would be the end of the world back in the 1980s, and that writeable CDs would also end the world back in the 1990s, and most recently about how MP3 players would end the world in the 2000s. But the world did not end the first time the RIAA cried wolf. And it did not end the second time the RIAA cried wolf. Nor did it end the third time the RIAA cried wolf. And now nobody will ever listen to them again. But yet record companies still exist, and that is not because of their efforts to stymie technology; they still exist because consumers permit them to exist, even when there are piracy options available.

Ultimately, companies just have to recognize that "loss" =\= "less than the potential maximization of profit"

Mr Hyena wrote:

We should be embracing 3D printing and technologies like it

So, again, why ever buy a model again if we embrace 3D printing?

We wouldn't, which is the point. In the short term, 3D printing will be a business innovation, in model making it would replace injection moulding and similar industrial-scale plastic forming techniques, once it reaches the required fidelity, and yes, during this period there will likely be people sharing scans of miniatures or their own ripoff designs over the internet so people can 3D print them at home; just as is currently the case with products that are purely information like music and movies - industries which are, by the way, posting record profits every year. In the medium-term, the illegal filesharing online will force the commercial entities to innovate and change their business models(just as it has in the movie and music industries); instead of miniature companies making physical products, they'll sell electronic files with the information necessary to print your own models on your Sony KL-5 Super-3D. In the long term, once automation advances to a degree sufficient to also remove labour requirements from resource extraction, processing, and transportation, it won't matter if someone "steals" a design and makes their own copy, or remixes someone else's work, because modern orthodox economics will be entirely obsolete; if all infrastructure is built and maintained automatically, if food is produced automatically, if resources are extracted, processed, and transported automatically, and those resources are made into final products automatically, the only way to base a monetary economy on that process is to use legal and governmental authority to enforce artificial scarcity.

Automation has only one possible outcome; the end of capitalism, indeed all current economic theory. The only variables are how long it takes, and how painful it is for the people not in control of the current system. If we embrace new technology, invest in research, and expect business to innovate rather than legislate its way through this transitionary period, then it will take some small number of decades and be as smooth as such a paradigm shift can be. If we take the other course, shunning technological advancements, stunting research, and using propaganda and the law to attempt to suppress competition, then we'll be living through a century-long Gilded-age, where an increasing wealth gap consigns large sections of the population to permanent poverty while the current wealth holders become an unassailable elite more entrenched than any nobility of years past.

"Piracy" is the symptom of a world out of step with itself. The internet is a place where scarcity must be imposed in order for it to exist; fundamentally scarcity cannot exist in a system where an item can be reproduced endlessly and with perfect fidelity for near-zero cost. However, the internet exists in a world which is still subject to scarcity due to labour costs, and so which requires that interactions resulting in information exchange be mutually compensatory. The question is; would you rather we work to make the real world emulate the internet, or stifle the internet in order that it conform to the real world?

azazel the cat wrote:Go ask Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails.

Not coincidentally, these two bands also kick butt on stage. You know, how bands used to get paid.

Both of those albums were released well into their NIN and Radiohead's careers, after they had made a good living on their first 6 albums (or thereabouts).

azazel the cat wrote:I do understand where you're coming from (it's you, biccat, who is the IP lawyer, right?) but the truth of the matter is that record companies cried about how cassette tapes would be the end of the world back in the 1980s, and that writeable CDs would also end the world back in the 1990s, and most recently about how MP3 players would end the world in the 2000s. But the world did not end the first time the RIAA cried wolf. And it did not end the second time the RIAA cried wolf. Nor did it end the third time the RIAA cried wolf. And now nobody will ever listen to them again. But yet record companies still exist, and that is not because of their efforts to stymie technology; they still exist because consumers permit them to exist, even when there are piracy options available.

Yes, I'm an IP lawyer, but I don't really think you've thought this through.

Imagine there's no IP protection. Once Company A releases an album I would copy the CD and cover art, repackage the whole thing, and it at a lower price than Company A. I would use a professional-level CD copier and printer. There would be almost no discernable difference between the original and my copy. The key difference would be that I don't have to pay the performer anything, so my copy could sell for a few dollars less. Repeat for movies, books, and any other media that you like.

The purpose of copyright law isn't to stop individual users, it's to stop large competitors. The cost to sue individual users grossly outweighs any benefit you would get.

Sites like MegaUpload and Pirate Bay have more in common with large competitors than individual users because they're directly trading on the IP of other companies without having to compensate the artists who create the work.

A guy at my local FLGS has one of those printers @ school and he used it to print 120 space marines and 50 terminators out of it!

Okay it is illegal, okay the models have just 6 different shapes and are all one piece,
but he saved 934$ on those mini's!

hotsauceman1 wrote:Wait, GW went after a website for doing something illegal. When their whole operation is technically illegal
Say what you want but they have gall.
Or a nail in their head.
its probably both.

It's not illegal until a judge says it was.

Also, US law is pliable, maybe it won't be illegal after the case is over.

biccat wrote:Imagine there's no IP protection. Once Company A releases an album I would copy the CD and cover art, repackage the whole thing, and it at a lower price than Company A. I would use a professional-level CD copier and printer. There would be almost no discernable difference between the original and my copy. The key difference would be that I don't have to pay the performer anything, so my copy could sell for a few dollars less. Repeat for movies, books, and any other media that you like.

The purpose of copyright law isn't to stop individual users, it's to stop large competitors. The cost to sue individual users grossly outweighs any benefit you would get.

Sites like MegaUpload and Pirate Bay have more in common with large competitors than individual users because they're directly trading on the IP of other companies without having to compensate the artists who create the work.

Oddly enough people would still create art and music and make a career out of it using the same cheap methods as the pirates. How much more money does the RIAA make on CD sales each year compared to their artists? Good bands would get exposure through radio deals, the internet, and then make money through live shows as they always have. They might earn less, but compared to the level of work they do they and many other high earners could stand to make less and still live comfortably.

As for suing TPB into oblivion, I must ask how it's worked so far and if people really believe it would do anything. It gets even better now that they plan to switch entirely to magnet links so anybody will be able to copy their entire database in under 200 megabytes.

Frankly IP is no longer being used for what it was intended for anyway. It was laid down in US law to encourage creativity, but lifetime+ copyright for things like Mickey Mouse due to bribes by large companies have perverted it and people like you make a living ensuring your corporate masters wallets grow ever fatter. Better nobody make money than the corporate fat cats who buy policy and get handed money for failure because they're 'too big to fail.'


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Emerett wrote:

hotsauceman1 wrote:Wait, GW went after a website for doing something illegal. When their whole operation is technically illegal
Say what you want but they have gall.
Or a nail in their head.
its probably both.

It's not illegal until a judge says it was.

Also, US law is pliable, maybe it won't be illegal after the case is over.

US law tends to be pliable towards those with highly paid lobbyists and/or those that donate large sums to campaigns. Less so toward minorities, the poor, and anybody else that doesn't aid in assured reelection.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Wolf_Ov_The_Void wrote:A guy at my local FLGS has one of those printers @ school and he used it to print 120 space marines and 50 terminators out of it!

Okay it is illegal, okay the models have just 6 different shapes and are all one piece,
but he saved 934$ on those mini's!

Good on him, he's got the entrepreneurial spirit that people are supposed to have to live the American dream. How many large companies got rich from shady deals many years ago and now use that power to keep others from doing the same?

Canadian 5th wrote:Oddly enough people would still create art and music and make a career out of it using the same cheap methods as the pirates. How much more money does the RIAA make on CD sales each year compared to their artists? Good bands would get exposure through radio deals, the internet, and then make money through live shows as they always have. They might earn less, but compared to the level of work they do they and many other high earners could stand to make less and still live comfortably.

And yet...because I don't have to pay the artists, I will still be able to undercut them. Especially because they won't be using production-level equipment.

Do you think the total value of music today is greater or less than the total value of music 100 years ago?

Canadian 5th wrote:As for suing TPB into oblivion, I must ask how it's worked so far and if people really believe it would do anything. It gets even better now that they plan to switch entirely to magnet links so anybody will be able to copy their entire database in under 200 megabytes.

Give me dictator-like powers and I'll shut down TPB. Heck, just give me a wealthy enough client who is willing to do whatever it takes and I'll shut them down.

biccat wrote:

Canadian 5th wrote:Oddly enough people would still create art and music and make a career out of it using the same cheap methods as the pirates. How much more money does the RIAA make on CD sales each year compared to their artists? Good bands would get exposure through radio deals, the internet, and then make money through live shows as they always have. They might earn less, but compared to the level of work they do they and many other high earners could stand to make less and still live comfortably.

And yet...because I don't have to pay the artists, I will still be able to undercut them. Especially because they won't be using production-level equipment.

Do you think the total value of music today is greater or less than the total value of music 100 years ago?

That's great, many people will stay pay the artist and they will always have first crack at dealing with radio stations and generating add revenue from their music/brand so they still out earn you no matter what your price CD's at. Self produced artists also only lose time compared to you. A copy cat also can't make nearly as much on live shows even if they do get the look and lip syncing down. So while you can sell your cheap bootlegs, just as you could sell cheap CD's or VHS's the artist and label will still get the vast majority of the profits from sources you can't have.

It's also been shown that piracy of a product tends to increase income for the producers of the product. Of course somebody in your field should already be up on such studies so I'll only link them if you show that you suck at your job enough to ask for them. Heck, even if you have I bet you'll spew a bunch of nonsense from studies back by the companies against piracy while ignoring the validity of third party studies.

As to the value of music of course it's higher today but that's a factor of population increase, mass production technology, greater ease of broadcasting/distribution, and plain inflation.

biccat wrote:

Canadian 5th wrote:As for suing TPB into oblivion, I must ask how it's worked so far and if people really believe it would do anything. It gets even better now that they plan to switch entirely to magnet links so anybody will be able to copy their entire database in under 200 megabytes.

Give me dictator-like powers and I'll shut down TPB. Heck, just give me a wealthy enough client who is willing to do whatever it takes and I'll shut them down.

Who would grant you those powers just so you can censor the internet? The people have spoken and it wasn't for draconian measures against the internet.

Also, even with those steps good luck getting it to stay down given that private citizens already have backups of the data stored on those servers and even at it's worst it was piss easy to get to a webpage blocked by SOPA/PIPA.

@ avatar 720
How about these ? http://www.shapeways.com/model/414990/autocannon_arms_v0_5.html?gid=mg
Will they do ?

Canadian 5th wrote:So while you can sell your cheap bootlegs, just as you could sell cheap CD's or VHS's the artist and label will still get the vast majority of the profits from sources you can't have.

I don't think you understand. These aren't "cheap bootlegs," they're similar quality to anything that is available today, from anyone. Remember, copyright is gone.

I'll also reproduce video games. And movies. So while the studio might make a movie for $10 million and has to sell 1 million DVD's at $15 each, I'll sell the same at $5 each, almost all profit.

Canadian 5th wrote:Of course somebody in your field should already be up on such studies so I'll only link them if you show that you suck at your job enough to ask for them. Heck, even if you have I bet you'll spew a bunch of nonsense from studies back by the companies against piracy while ignoring the validity of third party studies.

Why should I care about studies about piracy? Those things have zero impact on my job, one way or the other.

Canadian 5th wrote:

biccat wrote:Give me dictator-like powers and I'll shut down TPB. Heck, just give me a wealthy enough client who is willing to do whatever it takes and I'll shut them down.

Who would grant you those powers just so you can censor the internet? The people have spoken and it wasn't for draconian measures against the internet.

Just over the US armed forces or CIA. I'm not talking about censoring the internet, I'm talking about going against copyright infringement.

I could also do it through the courts if I had a favorable prosecutor (not doing anything illegal, simply for issuing subpoenas and signing off on warrants). And, again, enough money. Lawsuits aren't cheap.

Canadian 5th wrote:Also, even with those steps good luck getting it to stay down given that private citizens already have backups of the data stored on those servers and even at it's worst it was piss easy to get to a webpage blocked by SOPA/PIPA.

Well, first you're wrong about SOPA/PIPA, but if you really want to have that debate, either start a new thread or send me a PM.

Second, only people who have already made the investment in backing up TPB are going to be able to continue to use its services. At the very least, it would cut down on piracy. Which is the ultimate goal.