The real price of dowloading?

Friend of a friend received a warning, threatening him with a hefty fine if he continued to use shareware. He has since uninstalled.

Where's locally ?

With all due respect, this thread should be titled "The real price of illegal downloading" or "What it costs if you get caught cheating".
Geez, maybe I'm narrow minded, but they should just get a job so they can afford the stuff they're stealing.
David

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Friend of a friend received a warning, threatening him with a hefty fine if he continued to use shareware.

shareware is free whay would he be threatened with a fine if he used it? Or was he threatened because he was using shareware software for illegal purposes?

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By sheer coincidence I know a young chap who has just received a demand for £13,000 from a lawyer acting for the antipiracy people for illegal downloading of films, games and music from a file sharing site.

Is that an offer for an out of court settlement?

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shareware is free

No that would make it FREEware.

Shareware is software that has an initial free trial period after which the user has to pay a license fee for continued usage. Continued usage after the trial period has expired would make you a bad person at best and a criminal at worst.

Nigel

The young man involved works a 37 hour week is early 20's with a young baby. They can't afford a reliable car though his wife has now started working.

By local I mean this area of Denmark.

A year ago the same exercise was carried out by the antipiracy group on file sharers. None has appeared in court so far.

I wondered what the reaction would be to my thread. I was particularly interested in penalty comparisons for different crimes.

Sorry Two-Sheds, I know very little more about the case so cannot speculate on the legal side.

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[QUOTE]Originally posted by NaimDropper:
With all due respect, this thread should be titled "The real price of illegal downloading" or "What it costs if you get caught cheating".
Geez, maybe I'm narrow minded, but they should just get a job so they can afford the stuff they're stealing.
_____________________________________________________________
Lets get things in perspective. Huge, multi-national record companies have been ripping off the music buyer for years. Over priced merchandise and often low quality product . e.g. re-releasing cd's with demo's etc... Anniversary editions, legacy editions, continuing to sell cd's by major artists at high prices after they have already made millions selling the original vinyl. Not to mention high ticket prices for live gigs and all the other merchandise thats thrown at us. That such corporate greed is met with people downloading music for free causes me to lose no sleep whatsoever.

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Geez, maybe I'm narrow minded

yes, you are but I guess that puts you in good company.

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, but they should just get a job so they can afford the stuff they're stealing.

for starters, the offence is breach of copyright it is NOT stealing, no matter what the pigopolists say.
Who's to say they're NOT buying the stuff they're downloading?
I frequent lots of 'illegal' download sites and 'steal' lots of songs, but you know what, as many surveys and reports have found, this leads to more music being sold because like most other people I buy the stuff I like. Now, since the pigopolists have been closing down my preferred download sites I've been downloading far less, and guess what? I've been buying far less. In the last 2-3 years I've bought something like 500 cds and dvds. This year's total is 5. As far as I'm concerned any industry that not only sues their own customers but puts 'anti-piracy' measures in place that result in an inferior product while having absolutely no effect in preventing piracy deserve nothing.
The pigopolists have been going on with this crap for years. Take a look at your lps if you have any. "home taping is killing music" is printed on many from the 70s. "Radio is killing music" was another. "the vcr is going to kill the movie industry" another. Can you see a common theme here?
Meanwhile these nice people that you are defending have been screwing over artists for years - never make the mistake of thinking any of this is about protecting the rights of the artists - and have also been found guilty of fixing prices.

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Originally posted by Two-Sheds:

Is that an offer for an out of court settlement?

That's my question too. How exactly did the parties who are claiming damages determine the amounts? A cease and desist order I'd understand. They surely don't expect to be paid on the basis of these letters. Perhaps if anybody formally disputes the amounts claimed there might be some progress into a disputes forum like a court. Sounds like the parties who are claiming damages are acting on the advice of Public Relations advisors.

What amount of downloading are they doing to get charged like that or are they UP loading which is in my book significantly different?

I've done a bit of browsing around the subject in Scandinavia. (where one third of households have broadband with 512 fairly standard and 2 megs popular with gamers)

A popular ISP in Sweden was raided and their servers removed. But it seems that the antipiracy bods had paid their own informant to fill the servers with illegal material! Natually this produced a reaction from the "pirates" who started attacking the antipiracy website. The police are treating the case as "non-urgent".

My guess is that these huge amounts of money being demanded from working class lads, students and teenagers are simply scare tactics to put people off downloading. There are some very comfortable lifestyles at stake in the entertainment media industry. They have been enjoying themselves for a very long time.

I find it difficult to imagine that these young chaps downloading a film all day while they are at work can amount to more than the face value of the same DVD at the local supermarket. A song cannot be worth more than the market price for the CD. A game is only worth its package price at the supermarket.
How on earth could this amount to many thousands of pounds worth of property?

If they went into a supermarket and stole every item that they had downloaded (and were caught) they would probably not face a fine of one hundredth of the amounts being demanded.

Nime

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quote:

shareware is free

No that would make it FREEware.

Shareware is software that has an initial free trial period after which the user has to pay a license fee for continued usage. Continued usage after the trial period has expired would make you a bad person at best and a criminal at worst.

indeed, thanks for the correction I really should know better

Anyway it is indeed usually pretty cheap and I can't imagine any person/company selling shareware using lawyers threatening people for money.

What's a pigopolist?

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Originally posted by Richard Brown:
What's a pigopolist?

do a search for pigopolist here.

John I read through 4 of the search return articles then did a define query which gave back one hugely long document and after all that I am still none the wiser.

So just for the thickets here, what is a Pigopolist?

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So just for the thickets here, what is a Pigopolist?

any member of the recording industry.
Here's a nice definition:

"Finally, if you are wondering what pigopoly is, a pigopolist is a term meaning a very greedy oligopoly such as the record industry the word is currently being used by many including American congress."

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illegal downloading of films, games and music

"Illegal" --
This is what I read and why I called it "stealing".
Pigopolist or not, if the law calls it stealing then, well, it is.
The law may be immoral, stupid, wrong, etc. but you still have to live by it or suffer the consequences. And if you don't live by it yet have the high moral ground, ultimately, if all goes well, the law is changed for the better.
I know people who spend a great deal of time downloading music and movies off such sites. The thrill of having something you shouldn't is apparently the big motivator for them.
Downloaded music is not interesting to me, the fidelity is usually poor at best. And is only good for playback in the car or whatever. And if I want to see a movie I'll either go to the theater or rent it. Watching a tiny, grainy picture with lousy sound on my computer is not entertaining to me. I spend too much time looking at that stupid screen anyway.
OK, I guess I'm wound up. Sorry.
Crashing down on some poor chap that has nothing better to do than download movies seems excessive to me, more than a bit heavy-handed. And the pendulum will have to swing hard a couple of times before a reasonable balance is struck on such "crime and punishment". I plan on staying out of the way of the pendulum...
David

And for the "record" (sorry) I can't stand what the music industry has done to pop music. That is a crime against humanity.
But stealing their trash doesn't make up for their wrongs.
David

And I thought musicians were free imaginative agents of conscience ?

Fritz Von Selling your soul by the pound

Here's a nice definition:

"Finally, if you are wondering what pigopoly is, a pigopolist is a term meaning a very greedy oligopoly such as the record industry the word is currently being used by many including American congress."[/QUOTE]

Oligopoly? What the hell is that? Oligarchy perhaps?

With hand on heart can the lawyers pushing these cases honestly say they have never taped an album from a friend, had a compilation taped off the radio etc etc.

Hipocritical bastards.

Jonathan

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Originally posted by Nigel Cavendish:
Oligopoly? What the hell is that?

You've never heard of an oligopoly?

"Where market availability is held by a limited number of firms."
"A market for a good or service in which the decisions of at least one of the sellers have an impact on the market price. The limiting case of an oligopoly is a monopoly."
"A market situation with a small number of firms producing the majority of a particular industry's production."
etc

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Originally posted by Shayman:
With hand on heart can the lawyers pushing these cases honestly say they have never taped an album from a friend, had a compilation taped off the radio etc etc.

or borrowed a book from a friend, listened to music at a friend's house, taped tv to watch later... the list goes on.

You guys are confusing justice with the law and lawyers. Never the twain shall meet.

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You guys are confusing justice with the law and lawyers. Never the twain shall meet.

Couldn't agree more!!!

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or borrowed a book from a friend, listened to music at a friend's house, taped tv to watch later... the list goes on.

Please don't tell me that borrowing a book is illegal in the UK... or Sydney... And listening to music at a friend's house??!!
Isn't that a bit over the top?
If something is for sale and the market is protected by trade laws AND you find a way to obtain it while skirting the trade laws...
How can it be legal and legit? Or morally right?
Even if the people who own and distribute it are scumbags it doesn't make it right to take it without paying. And certainly doesn't help the situation.
David