Verno wrote on Apr 12, 2012, 09:25:
That's a straw man though, no one said companies are not losing a single dollar due to piracy. You were the one who started out with the grandiose claims about piracy based on incredibly limited personal anecdotes without a shred of data to back them up then said it justifies massive copyright reform and restriction of personal freedoms.
It's not a straw man when the entire point I was making is that these people losing money means more regulation. Why do you think SOPA wasn't the end of it? Why are they slowly but surely moving all consumers to closed systems?
There is a consistent idea on this forum that these companies have to just suck it up and deal with it, you even post that same kind of thing below. "You're making money, shut the fuck up." My entire argument here is that will NEVER work. They will NEVER accept that. Continued abuse of the internet to get free shit will result in more and more regulation. I don't know what form it will finally take or whether I will agree with it or not, I just know it's coming and it's not hard to see why.
Nothing inherently wrong with being a big corporation except when you try to literally write copyright enforcement laws without public input.
There is public input throughout the entire process. People choose to support companies by buying their products. People support the products by buying them over others. People support the laws made to protect companies by voting in politicians who do so, or not giving a fuck when they do. You can't blame general apathy because hundreds of issues have shown people WILL get riled up when they care, they just don't about most of the shit people bitch about on here.
They did get riled up about SOPA, and thus it stopped. Will they about the next one? Do they care enough to keep going when the hype train is done? Who knows. I doubt it.
Besides, putting "piracy" under some big catch all is really silly. Commercial piracy is a whole other beast from consumer piracy.
Of course, I only balked at his statement that consumer piracy is not abuse of the internet, which is absurd.