Posts by Crumplecorn

Vodafone Ireland admits pocketing dormant PAYG cash

Sensible practices

A number of the complaints in here boil down to 'the company will only let me use their service if they make money off me!' or 'the phone companies remove apparently dead phones from the network!'. Not exactly compelling complaints.

Web 0.2 archivists save Geocities from deletion

Plus one point eight

The only difference between Geocities and the Blogosphere is that Geocities had eye candy.

Now the wastelands of the Tubewebs are a bland place indeed.

Swedish police claim massive anti-piracy bust

@Theft?

"If you watch a film illegally and then tell someone else not to watch it because you don't think it's very good, again you have caused a loss."

Similarly, if you watch a film in the cinema and convince a friend who was going to go not to because it is rubbish, you have caused a loss. And since you equate causing a loss with theft, this is theft too.

This is probably why people who know what they are talking about differentiate between copyright infringement, download=lostsale, and actual physical theft. If you start to equate them, you end up in ridiculous situations where a bad review of a film is theft on a grand scale as it convinces many people to not pay to see the film.

Similarly with uploading, we differentiate theft and unauthorized distribution, because otherwise we end up with possible situations such as you being a thief for uploading a copy of a film to your friend, even if your friend decides later on to buy the DVD due to enjoying the film, thus gaining the producers a sale.