Your opinion on piracy?

That is exactly what i meant- THE ONES THAT COME WITH THE NAME AND LOGO OF ARDUINO, when there is no need for, as its open source !!!!
Theres lots of cheap silly clones with either the logo, the name or both, spreading throughout. That is all i meant ! The compatible arduinos are not clones but legal alt versions, which i very much support.
I advocate for open source ! can compete with commercial products due to the love of people !
I actually ordered some of the alternative versions as well, as a lot have something new to offer( other not really).

This is what I think too, I paid a fairly cheap price for an uno and mega off e-bay, only to find out after a few months they are clones advertised as the real deal. I would have gladly paid a little extra to have authentic boards. None of the clone profits are returned to the Arduino project.

Exactly. I think its up to the person to decide if they support original project or prefer go for a cheaper alternative.
There are actually nice projects out there at the moment- One of the ones i most interested in is the Pinguino and the Chipkit type of boardsm with the Pic32MX on it... Most libraries are compatible, and you can decide what language to use !! Im definitely having one !!

@ iyahdub

I totally see your point. However the model of the CD-distributer is sort of outdated in our western world. Therefore it would be nice to reduce their rights and increase the rights of the artist. Again, I am not sure yet how this model should work, maybe some micro-credit/payment system - but with my options now I rather download an album then buy it at walmart.

edit: its not only that the distribution system is outdated, its also the fact (and some purists will jump on me for that, but I believe its true) that the equipment required for producing high quality music has become exponentially cheaper in the last 15 years.

regarding the price of equipment is kinda irrelevant, as the cost of releasing it gone up. Plus aint as many shows livewise, which used to be one of the bread and butter of bands and artists.
The thing of producing an album being almost prohibitive was something "invented" by the big sharks to reduce artists share, by inventing extra and inflated prices.
Also- Formats like vinyl still sell a lot as well; Sometimes more than CD tbh. Even if it is all available in E-edition for downloads, will still hurt the artist a lot.
Why is it that people dont listen to royalty free music ?!? because its not the same thing, not the same quality !! Has a different purpose !
But yeah, at the moment something needs to be done. And falling down hard on thoose that use pirate music is a start.
Look at Japan... Why you think its one of the biggest music markets ?!? Because they always been hard handed on piracy, even in the times of tape !

"AH BUT ITS KIDS MAINLY DOING IT"...Well, go down hard on their parents...Its their responsability anyway ! Same way you go to prison if you dont make sure your kids go to school, you have to be responsible for their actions.

how does downloading damage vinyl? a download can never replace a record. With vinyl you get quality which you cannot stream from the internet.

what do you mean with "less live-shows"? (I don't understand)
what do you mean "the price of releasing has gone up?" (I disagree, but maybe I just don't understand what you are saying.)

going down on pirates ... yes and no.
i.e. closing down library.nu deprived me of one of my most important sources for study material I use for university. it will not bring money to anyone, as I will not buy any of the things I downloaded there. so closing library.nu damaged many people (especially in india/africa) while hardly making any profit for anyone...

where it comes to immaterial goods, I am not sure if piracy is only a bad thing.

in regards to the creative industry: cut out the middle-men; ditch an industry which should have learned 15 years ago that their business model will no longer work. cracking down on individuals wont fix anything...

I was just thinking some more about why I am so ambivalent to the whole "music piracy" thing.

a) people have always shared music and recordings - i.e. I remember making and sharing cassettes before napster came along.
b) music is a product, it should be valued as such. but this also means that the artist needs to accept it, when people chose not to pay for your music.

you have two options now. you either say "well, then I wont publish it" or you say "ok, I'll figure out a way to deal with it".

two examples

  1. My own band.

I played in various groups, had some connections, sort of new the music scene and had the basic contacts to set up gigs in semi-nice locations etc. We where super ambitious for about a year - got really good (and really bad) press, recorded a live-concert and sold it as an album (no one bought it) played around 25 gigs and eventually fell apart. This is about 5 years ago.

Last year, somebody from Germany uploaded a bunch of my recordings to youtube (some of them from demo-recordings I made in order to show potential bandmembers what I want us to sound like). A friend of mine stumbled upon a copy of our CD in Warsaw about half a year ago.

As the band no longer exists, I sort of smile at this and feel happy that somewhere my music is still appreciated. If my band still existed I would not react by thinking "They did not pay for the CD. Someone should crack down on them for pirating". Rather I would try to contact these people and see if they could help me set up a gig.

As such the internet is an amazing medium, and if people would crack-down on pirates the options I just described would never come about.

  1. Wir Sind Helden

They are a german band. I think around spring 2003 my girlfriend introduced me to them - she had found out about them from a friend who gave her some mp3 files. I did not really care much for them, but becouse she liked them so much I downloaded some music, and it grew on me. It got no airplay, because, while being very much pop-music it was definitively not mainstream.

That summer we went to a music festival. Wir Sind Helden was still unsigned and unknown when the festival was set up, so they had a timeslot from around 11:30 am to noon, or something like that. The place was packed. As in. there where more people there than came for metallica or placebo who where the main headliners of the festival.

Now realize - this band had next to zero airplay in austria (where I grew up) and their CD was not on the market yet. The only way people new about this band was through the internet.

After that summer, Wir Sind Helden became huge - they are quite a phenomenon IMO.

I heard them play a couple of years later, and the lead singer commented on piracy. She said that she is agains it. She also says though, that she is really confused about it, as she credits a large part of the bands popularity to mp3 files destributed over the internet. She told of her first concerts she gave in Austria:

"When we played [some song, I cant remember which one] all of a sudden everyone started singing along the lyrics. I was really confused - it was our first show in Austria, and our CD was not yet for sale. So I asked the crowd 'How do you know the lyrics' and they said 'We downloaded the music from the internet'"

My point is, that while Wir Sind Helden wants us to buy their CDs, it would be hypocritical of them to demand that governments crack down on music sharing, as music sharing is what made them the phenomenon they are.

ok.

I'm off. Just felt like sharing.

p.

Regarding vynil was an afirmation, and less live shows was expressing all the other things that aint helping the situation.

And please dont mix using the net as an advertisement place to download it illegally.
Those casual cases u mentioned and others are one in a million. For such a case theres thousands of artists being ripped of money they would otherwise have gotten into their pockets. So dont think theres excuse. You can say what you want. From the moment you say it is alright to break one law, then the thing is you also saying any law can be broken.

And the difference of you sharing a tape with some friends as to share it with millions if not the whole world has no comparison . All it takes is one to share it online !! How can you even compare that ?!?

Plus might be alright for you, but its not for me that i live off the music industry.
Now, i agree we all need to adapt. No doubt about that !
But as i said, i already give some music away for promotion purposes, but let me chose what i want to share.

If not, we might as well forget about civilized societies and break into anarchy...

dude. I completely agree that you should decide what to share and what not to share.

I just do not believe that you can have the great promotional tool: internet and complete control over your media at the same time. Many artists profit greatly from this promotional tool, so it would be hypocrisy to fight against it simultaneously.

I also do not believe that every track of yours which is illegally downloaded is revenue you miss. I think that is a bit of a naive assumption. If somebody is ripping off artists its huge record labels which pay shitty royalties.

Or do you actually feel like the net is making you loose revenue? Or do you have a concrete example where there is direct damage? (I am actually open to hearing this - I am not just asking rhetoric questions.)

I, as a user, want to be able to dump my favorite tracks on my friends computer. Just like I used to copy cd's onto tapes to give to friends, or later on burn CDs.

Saying I do not understand, because I don't live from it is too simple - I attempted to live from it for quite some time, and I have several friends who do live from producing or working with music. My personal opinion is far from set in stone. Its a really difficult question...

Yeah, of course. I might not have expressed myself right, so might have sounded a bit abrupt, for which i apologize. But its something too close to chest.
Yeah i have several cases, as i release stuff out of my pockets as well, so yeah, hurts straight in my pocket ! But you are right in the fact that net also helps a lot.

fkeel:
I heard them play a couple of years later, and the lead singer commented on piracy. She said that she is agains it. She also says though, that she is really confused about it, as she credits a large part of the bands popularity to mp3 files destributed over the internet.

This is the thing, basically. A band becomes popular these days because people can download their stuff. Once they become popular they will get paid for live performances. So piracy has helped them, full stop. If there wasn't the initial piracy, they wouldn't be well known, they wouldn't get paid, and they wouldn't be in a position to complain about the piracy.

I think the Internet also frees artists (and authors) from having to convince a publisher, or record company, to produce the physical product. So you can self-publish these days for virtually nothing. Of course some of it will be pirated.

But I remember the days of Turbo Pascal, when other Pascal compilers would cost $1000 or more and you had to sign agreements not to copy, and they had copy-protected disks, etc.

Then Borland released Turbo Pascal for (from memory) $79. It was not copy-protected, and came with a hefty user manual too. In fact, photocopying the manual would probably have cost you $79. So everyone bought it. Maybe a few copies were made for friends, or colleagues, but hey, Borland get very rich from the approach of taking a light-hearted view of piracy. They are still going strong. No-one ever hears of their competitors, the ones who were so anti-piracy.

I leant to program c++ on Borland. My collage tutor gave me a copy because it's what we had at collage.

Just because a band gets popular by people ripping it off doesn't make it right or morally acceptable.
A band can always release a track for free download, and many do. However, it is the band's decision to make it available, not some grubby eark who never created anything in his life and bleats about music should be free.

By the way, talking of giving music away for free...
If any of your likjes reggae and dub, here are the several compilations we been ginving away with the best of the new generation of dub and reggae...All killas, no fillas in there.
1st link is the labels website( wich was formed with intention to give away music, by an OUTERNATIONAL collective from UK, Germany, Spain and Postugal, though their members include artists from all over, including china which is quite new to reggae and dub).
2nd link is a sure place to download it as the other links might be off now and then !!

http://dubvibrations.com/

http://www.dub-connection.net/downloads/list.php

Very interesting discussion indeed. Nick's comment on Turbo Pascal reminds me of how Microsoft condemns piracy about their DOS then Windows and the wide spread of those two operating systems. Think of this for a moment, you are using your own PC at home with a pirated version of MS DOS and you liked it. maybe a lot of your geeky friends talk about their exploits with DOS or else too. What would you say when it comes to equipping your office with a company-paid-all computer for work, or maybe with the entire company's computer? It is a very strange problem isn't it? Large companies can be sued and money be made from law suit or they pay to cover their behinds. Besides, the act of piracy is more of a moral problem than black and white. I think moral standards are different among all of us, since that is not an objective thing. Same goes with laws. The universe didn't decide to ban piracy cause I would have learned that in intro physics, but humans did, probably wealthy ones, not the producers or artists of the products. When China opened its doors to the west, numerous big companies came in to register all sorts of things and the like so they can grab the rights to these things. Well, within the country, some crazy company (and famous one) registered the name of a province as their brand name and raged a war against anyone else using the same name to sell alcohol, well, everybody else making booze in that booze-famous province of course and more. Don't think the person that decided the province name (probably ancient history) could have any share of the booze sale. I think this concludes (with a shaky argument) that money drives laws against piracy and other intellectual property infringements more than anything else. You can like piracy as a way to get stuff for free or get your name out there, you could hate it for the same reason. But until money disappears, keep the rest of us entertained (products or arguments), we'll pay, or else :wink:

Here's another one. Some of you may know that Diablo 3 (the game) was released yesterday. Now even in single player mode you have to "log in" to a central server for some sort of credential validation. I am guessing this is something to do with protecting the game from being pirated.

But guess what? The servers are down right now (possibly, overloaded). So even people who have paid good money, and are honestly sitting at home with their purchased product, cannot use it. There is something wrong here.

http://arduino.cc/forum/index.php/topic,104353.0.html

This poster just came for advice on how to implement a project..

A project for which he linked to an illegal PDF copy of Simon Monk's 30 Evil Genius Projects for Arduino book, which was given to him by his teacher.

Simon's a regular poster here. I certainly hope he doesn't make his income from writing, because even teachers don't give a crap about literary copyright. These people are taking book royalties directly out of his pocket. Let's all hope it's not how Simon feeds his family. How many copies has that ONE advisor given away? How many copies of that PDF then are sent around by the students? Why would Simon waste his time and efforts ever again, KNOWING that people with no talent of their own will steal his work, and in many cases make profit on it behind his back?

But by all means, you have a right to whatever you want, just because you want it.

Why not tell Simon yourself that his work has no value beyond how fast you can copy it? Here's his site...

I thought you misidentified this post as the recent purchase post. LOL yes I have only got one game between doom 3 and now, a game developed by a very small company maybe in Turkey. I played the trial game and some more but finally broke down and got a license thru amazon. You need to be checked with your S/N number before logging online as a security measure but I bet later versions would check single-player game S/N too. The game is good but my computer is slow (who would game on a 2009 laptop?!) and plagued with trigger-happy team-killing BS players at times. Once in a while I stood at a spot to assess the fight going on and someone on my team walks up to me and slash a sword at me. Otherwise say you killed X and X re-spawn to try to kill you and this goes on but that's ok since you are on different teams.

So Nick, once you can log on, tell us something about the game. I'm mainly interested in the business model.

Do they do in-game purchase like apple's in-app purchase? Say you want a big ax, instead of beating 10,000 minions to get gold to purchase it, you just pay $10 cold hard cash with your credit card and get it instantly. It's a "new" trend I discovered. People used to play for hours and beat Baal time after time to get that magical item with lottery luck.

What is its rating, R or PG13 something like that? (Ok, rated M 17+, just looked online)

Does the USB stick do anything special?

I owned Diablo II a long time ago. It was a very good game. I got it with Diablo I and the expansion of Diablo II for $10 from bestbuy, when they probably think they will never make any sequels. One of my friends played hours at a time with his dialup around 2000. But now they are back again, ah? Even the old games are twice as expensive :slight_smile:

I'm definitely not touching that game. Could be very addicting, so you go ahead and let us know what happens :slight_smile:

Now back to the IP and piracy issue, it's still all about money, aren't it? I surely hope Simon gets some pay for the stolen work. I'm unable to protect what I write or will write, if, in case, they get kind of popular, so I will hopefully make everyone pay ;), just out of tax dollar supported national grants, for future open source books and hardware I will make for some educational purposes. Wish me good luck. It's like getting paid up front for creating the content, instead of getting loyalty later, again what focalist mentioned in that photography post. Maybe everyone will feel happier when they get paid to create the content and decide not to ask for money thereafter. I think for some projects/products, this may be an alternative.

liudr:
So Nick, once you can log on, tell us something about the game. I'm mainly interested in the business model.

Do they do in-game purchase like apple's in-app purchase? Say you want a big ax, instead of beating 10,000 minions to get gold to purchase it, you just pay $10 cold hard cash with your credit card and get it instantly. It's a "new" trend I discovered. People used to play for hours and beat Baal time after time to get that magical item with lottery luck.

They have a new idea ... a "real money" auction house. In the past people would trade in-game stuff surreptitiously (eg. through eBay) so now they built it into the game. The idea is, you find some cool hear that you personally can't use (eg. it's for a different class of character) so you auction it, either for in-game gold, or real-life cash. I think Blizzard takes a cut, not sure. If they do, that's their business model. ... yes they do. They charge for the listing, and they charge for the actual sale, if any.

Now in a sense that's fair, because some people have time on their hands (eg. kids) and some have money, so if you only have time it seems a bit unfair you can get good gear by playing all weekend, while people who have real jobs, can't afford to spend the time, but may have a bit of spare cash.

Does the USB stick do anything special?

Apart from looking cool, it has a copy of Diablo II on it, and you get an unlock key in the box.

I take the point of entertainment argument. Fair enough, you pay to get entertained. This auction thing, though, is a very slippery slope. If I were Blizzard, I would create a bunch of pretense accounts, load up with unlimited random good gears and try to sell them off like a regular player is selling them. I could also be a hacker and keygen some items to sell off to get real money. It's still ok with your? :wink: I think people still sell WOW or other characters off ebay. Very interesting market, just like what they say "you can buy and sell anything".

To think more dark side, a class of players called man hunters, can be created with special gears and enslave others players and auction them off as slaves or ask for ransom (curse you evil thoughts). This did happen in dark and middle ages, right? Then you pay real or virtual money to ransom your virtual character. I wonder if the police would be interested in such cases, where a teenager robs a gas station to get real money to ransom his virtual character from some man hunters. Just thoughts. I'll stop sipping ginger ale.

focalist:
http://arduino.cc/forum/index.php/topic,104353.0.html

This poster just came for advice on how to implement a project..

A project for which he linked to an illegal PDF copy of Simon Monk's 30 Evil Genius Projects for Arduino book, which was given to him by his teacher.

Simon's a regular poster here. I certainly hope he doesn't make his income from writing, because even teachers don't give a crap about literary copyright. These people are taking book royalties directly out of his pocket. Let's all hope it's not how Simon feeds his family. How many copies has that ONE advisor given away? How many copies of that PDF then are sent around by the students? Why would Simon waste his time and efforts ever again, KNOWING that people with no talent of their own will steal his work, and in many cases make profit on it behind his back?

But by all means, you have a right to whatever you want, just because you want it.

Why not tell Simon yourself that his work has no value beyond how fast you can copy it? Here's his site...
http://www.arduinoevilgenius.com/

That goes to show...
Doesnt mattter what he does for a living...
Fact is he invested lots of time (which is money) and lots of money as well, im sure, to release it (unless her managed to get someone to do it for him, in which case there will be two people losing money).
So why should he be ripped off his own work, over someone elses profit( and not necessarily financial profit, as theres other ways of profiting from it) who has done nowt to deserve it ?!?.