Sage advice from a friend of Jim: So put your tinfoil hat back in the closet, open your eyes to the truth, and realize that the government is in fact causing austismal cancer with it's 9/11 fluoride vaccinations of your water supply.
Joined: 5/1/2004
Posts: 4096
Location: Rio, Brazil
Yes, people say that with the wisest face possible "Hey!!! I know a way to own every game released for the SNES!". This, said in 2010, has two mistakes:
- it is not news that it can be illegaly done (not to mention that they probably didn't know the SNES had more than 50 games before looking at the list)
- copying files from someone's pc to yours through p2p doesn't qualify as a subject for conversation
In fact, it's not always necessarily just about the "nostalgia", but purely because you want to play a good game, and that game happens to be made for an old console which you don't own and/or the game itself might not be available anymore.
Of course from a moral point of view this presents a dilemma, because technically speaking you are breaking the law by doing that. Personally speaking I would be completely ready to pay real money to buy certain PlayStation 1 games (which I could then play with an emulator, as I don't own the console), but those games are just not available, period. I have searched at local shops here which still sell some (used) PS1 games, but the selection is invariably very poor and naturally lack the games I want (mainly those of the JRPG kind). I have tried to search in online shops, and most just don't sell PS1 games at all, and even those which do, not very surprisingly have a very poor selection and lack the games I want. It's just physically impossible to get these games legally anymore. Of course this still doesn't make it any less illegal to just download the roms, at least technically speaking.
I attended an English course at the University here many years ago, and as a task we had to make a short presentation on any subject in English. One of the students made a presentation about a movie he saw (I think it was the South Park movie) and he very casually mentioned how he had downloaded it from the internet to see it (the movie was still rather new back then). I was a bit amazed how casually and naturally some people will admit to their own piracy in public, in front of a class of students and a professor, like it was the most natural thing in the world, without any worry.
A lot of old games are available on modern systems such as Wii Virtual Console. Shame you have to play on a Classic or Gamecube controller. The wiimote turned sideways will do fine for NES games, since its controller was so simple, but games for the SNES, mega drive and especially N64 were designed for a particular controller layout, and playing on something different would be confusing at best.
(mega drive == european genesis)
If that amazes you, don't come to Russia. Many of the movies shown here by professors are downloaded (and our largest torrent tracker actually received a public people's choice award a couple years ago).
More like it's because nobody makes a big deal out of it here. But it's still a far cry from, say, Sweden. Copyright infringement here is rather seen as something that is nominally evil and punishable but ultimately impossible to control on a large scale, partly because of two reasons.
1. RAO, our RIAA/MPAA analogue, is absurdly cocky and untrustworthy. It goes as far as to jump in protecting right possessors (record labels almost predominantly) from… the authors themselves (like it happened when they attempted to fine Deep Purple for unauthorized performance of their own songs)! And every time some large-scale copyright enforcement happens it always looks like a criminal act itself.
2. People got used to everybody copying everything. It happens on pretty much every level of the society and there are orders of magnitude more people doing it than those looking after them. Many of the "pirates" don't even see it as doing something bad because they've learned to share goods since they were little kids, and it would be hard, if not impossible, to convince them otherwise.
Maybe someday people as a whole will learn something from this.
lol, this thread is way off track, but i have a teacher at my school (ex football coach, and this is in us) who puts movies on the last few days of every term. he has a box of pirated movies that he casually pulls out. it has suprised me this past x years how many pirated movies i have seen shown at school.
This is now even more way out of track, since you changed the first post and the topic title. Now almost none of the messages here are actually relevant to the topic.
Depending on which country you live, you could anonymously inform the appropriate authorities. Especially if you have any kind of grudge against said professor or the school... (Of course this depends a lot on the country, but at least in Finland authorities would be interested if a public school was doing such blatant piracy.)
Sage advice from a friend of Jim: So put your tinfoil hat back in the closet, open your eyes to the truth, and realize that the government is in fact causing austismal cancer with it's 9/11 fluoride vaccinations of your water supply.
The actual person who broke copyright was the person who made it available to download, not the person who downloaded it. Second, copyright infringement is a civil case, not a criminal one for small infractions. Thus, turning the person over to the cops would achieve nothing.
Sage advice from a friend of Jim: So put your tinfoil hat back in the closet, open your eyes to the truth, and realize that the government is in fact causing austismal cancer with it's 9/11 fluoride vaccinations of your water supply.
In Finland simply downloading copyrighted material from an illegal source is illegal (at least that seems to be the case, as almost nobody really understands the new Finnish copyright law, not even the people who wrote the law).
Nevertheless, nowadays it's difficult to find movies which you can simply download, without also sharing them. The sharing part, at least, is illegal in most countries with common copyright laws.
You don't report it to the cops. You report to your local version of RIAA.