New US law: The PIRATE act

DEmeant0r

Sink the PIRATE Act

The PIRATE Act (S.2237) is yet another attempt to make taxpayers fund the misguided war on file sharing, and it's moving fast. The bill would allow the government to file civil copyright lawsuits in addition to criminal prosecutions, dramatically lowering the burden of proof and adding to the thousands of suits already filed by record companies. It would also force the American public to pay the legal bills of foreign record companies like Bertelsmann, Vivendi Universal, EMI, and Sony. Meanwhile, not a penny from the lawsuits goes to the artists.

The US government is fighting a war they cannot win, are they going to file a lawsuit on every person buying, selling or distributing illegal copies of software, music, movies etc?

User45701

i think its ok to download new episodes of TV shows not aired here yet.

downloading entire DVD seasons - hope they get lawsuits aswell

Music i dont know and dont care what is/will happen

Games - ye i hope everyone who downloads them gets a lawsuit

BigEejit

I think whoever downloads new episodes of TV shows not available here yet should get a lawsuit ... leave everyone else alone:D

but back on topic I dont think this one will go through at all, this is the studios pet senators fishing and looking like they are earning their money ..... the kicker is that the average American will have to cough up for foreign companies, that drives American absolutely nuts (quite rightly)

Dustaz

Originally posted by User45701
i think its ok to download new episodes of TV shows not aired here yet.

No matter what you 'think', its not 'ok'. Its illegal to do it and you are denying local TV stations revenue by doing it.

RossFixxxed

Absolutely, if something is good enough to be worth buying, it's worth buying. I always buy games/books/cds/dvds etc that I really love. It guarantees that there will be more made! It also means you don't end up with 3,000 cds of mediocre crap too.

I want to see them sued, but I also want to see this cause a price drop for people like me. Which I'm sure we all know is VERY unlikely.

Ross

one-angry-dwarf

I think its completely pointless. they cant prosecute everyone who downloads illegally. And even if they could, people would find other ways to do it. The best way record companies could at least reduce the amount of people downloading mp3s is to lower the extortionate amount they charge on cds. Theres no way i'm paying 20 euro for a cd when i can get it for free.

As far as harming the artist goes, thats a load of crap. Artist earn VERY little from cd sales. They earn most of their money from touring and publishing royalties. If anything, file sharing helps artist. I wouldnt have heard of plenty of the bands i listen to if it wasnt for file sharing, and in turn i wouldnt go see them when they come here. the only people who lose out as a result of file sharing is the record companies. so they have slightly less money to roll around in? big deal.