Closing me aye I hear: Bart 'tis in Barsin.

Of those listed, the closest is "Bart Simpson bouncing". But that might be confirmation bias as it IS the first one I read on the list. 2nd would be "Baptism piracy"

@JustSaying and @draebor --

I was aware of the ban on Nazi symbols / flags / etc. in Germany, and (wrongly) assumed that meant that the country was just kind of trying to "gloss over" that part of history; not talk about it in schools, etc. A sifter (can't remember who offhand) set me straight a few years ago.

However, this does remind me of a thought that I had then: what about piracy?

Any games featuring Nazis have to be heavily edited to get a legal German release. But are there any extra considerations for piracy, or even people that buy the original versions of such games outside of the country and them bring them in?

The internet is really ramping up the speed of globalization, and it seems like it would be essentially impossible to enforce the ban on Nazi imagery in the digital realm. The best a government can hope to control such things is to try to keep them out of the mainstream. But the world is full of examples of failures to control such things -- lots of cracks in the Great Firewall of China, El Paquete in Cuba, etc.

So I'm curious if Germany even makes any attempt to add any additional measure to try to prevent piracy of media containing those things, and/or circumventing region-blocked access to such things in legitimate distributors like Steam.

OK, sorry to spam here, but I found another relevant link:
https://www.geneticliteracyproject.org/2015/12/14/gmo-patent-controversy-terminator-genes-seed-piracy-forcing-farmers-buy-seeds/

That confirms that "terminator seeds" are a technology that does exist -- in practice as well as theory -- but isn't commercially sold or otherwise available.

More importantly, it mentions that there is a legal sort of "license agreement" that farmers sign when they buy the GM seed stating that they won't replant harvested stuff in the future, and that they can inspect your storage areas etc. if they suspect you are doing so. That would explain why my family worked hard to clean out storage areas that had grain resulting from GM seed. I erroneously thought that was because that grain was sterile.

Those agreements are for a single crop / harvest, so it is definitely possible to use a GM seed one year and then go back to non-GM seed in other years, as my family does. I guess that we just have to keep good records to show that we're not holding any back for future planting / sale.

Sorry for the several LONG posts, and thanks to @Hastur for asking the question that got me to figure out the misconception I had!

Very interesting, but I have some questions about the efficacy of those rules/laws with regards to actually keeping the uncensored versions out of German hands.

Here in Thailand, since 2008 all GTA games are specifically banned (after a nutter who killed a taxi driver said he was influenced by GTA), along with any games with "excessive violence" or sexual content. In spite of that, the majority of male students in the High School where I teach have played GTA5 or other GTA games. There are no legit physical copies for sale in stores (I assume they are also removed from Steam for Thai users but I dunno), but like with all media here piracy is rampant and kids either torrent/download pirated copies of the games for themselves or buy a pirated copy of the game on DVD from vendors that can be found in markets in every city or village.

The rampant piracy also circumvents Thai censorship laws that require movies to blur out people smoking, drinking alcohol, or nudity / sexual content. Legit copies (which are rare) adhere to the rules, but most people end up with pirated copies that are more often than not sourced from uncensored versions and therefore don't follow the local rules.

Pretty weird situation. Makes me wonder if now in the internet age many German consumers might have no moral qualms with buying legit German-censored versions of things and then downloading pirated / cracked versions from the internet that circumvent the censorship.

Yeah, I remember Quakeworld... I also remember Mplayer, Kali, Gamespy, TEN (Total Entertainment Network which was my favorite back then). Dial in and join chatrooms for Duke Nukem/Quake (1&2) matches and such... I'm not sure what happened with that, it almost seemed like it was a little too ahead of it's time (subscription fee and all). They also had a pretty cool exclusive MMO @ 1997/1998 called Dark Sun Online based on the AD&D franchise.

Hilarious to think that services like TEN & Mplayer seized to exist because of the example that Blizzard (one of my favorite developers) set with Battlenet being intrinsically a part of the game. It's a lot more convenient but I do miss those broad services & community that came with it. And now with all of this online only as basically an anti-piracy measure... every company has some sort of shite program that you have to download and log into. It sucks comparatively!!

PS4. It's one of those games where you just see other players in the hub areas, but the rest of the world is a private instance. Sometimes it was super laggy, with enemies reacting a couple seconds after they got shot, and I did get kicked by a complete server crash in the short time I tried it.

I just don't get why they screw up the single player experience by running it through a server. On the PC it's easy to guess it's to prevent piracy, like Simcity or Diablo III. But that shouldn't be an issue on consoles.

https://popcorntime.io/ is live and well and better interface than netflix.

I maintain that piracy is a service problem. Too many licensing and UI issues keep people from going legal. Movies should have an expiration of 15 years after which they should just go into public domain online - would solve a lot of problems, and still give movie companies 90 % of the money they get now without all the extra work.

As someone living in the land 'o piracy, I can recommend these ... uh ... "competitors":
www.yts.re
www.eztv.ch

But to be fair, well over half of the first set of "sins" (before adding in sins for movies not available on Netflix) were really nitpicky or even just plain arbitrary. Like the very first one:

"Netflix was established in 1997 as a subscription based DVD-by-mail service, who, within it's lifetime, helped transform and revolutionize the consumption of online video streaming." = SIN ???

The only problem with "freebooting" is it's a euphamism.

This seems more like commercial piracy.

Interesting. When free trade agreements are usually about removing corporate interests at an international level like stagnant subsidies and industry handouts, it's sad to see the opposite occurring.

In relation to the TPP, on the anti-piracy side here in Australia you had the conservative Liberal party currently in power attempt to move us towards a three strikes policy, although that seems off the table for now.

are you fucking kidding me? are they still hanging onto that myth that music piracy seriously hampered the music industry? They did studies that the industry actually profited because piracy exposed people to more bands that they ended up spending more money on.

The answer to most of your questions is what I already stated. The internet is full of experiments in monetization. Notice the plural. None of them have proven successful over a broad range of content, or location. Since damned near every country has it's own legal restrictions, I think it's pretty obvious why there's no single system to work for them all. The same goes for various types of content. What works for games isn't really going to work for music, or text.

And I don't think I ever suggested trying to stop piracy, or deal with those who'd rather steal than support the artists. I gave up on those a long time ago...but I have no problem with calling those who steal thieves, especially when there -are- other alternatives. Don't like the name, don't do the deed.

I doubt you're ever going to see one new strategy to rule them all (welcome to the balkanized world). If we do get one new system...it'll be because the plutarchs won, and we'll be more worried about buying our water than getting our games or movies.

@Stormsinger, then why can't I buy the music or tv shows I want from Amazon?

How come hulu or netflix aren't available in my country? I've said it before, I am happy to spend money on the content I want, just make it available to me for a reasonable price (i.e. not nearly double what people in the US are paying for it http://www.steamprices.com/au/topripoffs)

At what point is it my fault that there is literally no legal way for me to purchase the content I want due to an arbitrary geographical restriction?

So if the entire internet is an experiment in alternative monetization, it's a dismal fucking failure.

You want some examples that work?

Steam Sales
Louis CK selling his entire show for $5
Kickstarter (hell Star Citizen alone)

Some people will always choose free. Fine, maybe they just can't afford it, and telling them to just not watch it is never going to work. Forget those people. Focus on the ones who believe that good content deserves rewarding. Make it easy for them to access your content (reasonable price, no drm or arbitrary restrictions) and they will pay.

Trying to stop piracy is pointless. It's out there and as I said, someone people genuinely have a moral issue with paying for content (the OSS zealots for example). Just assume it's going to be pirated (it already is!) and make it easy for those of us who want to pay for it to get it.

Um, pretty sure this will be dead in a matter of days..this is blatant piracy...

As I understand it, the function copyright serves in a society is to protect and encourage creativity. It's hard to think that it's serving it's purpose when teens who create their own music video for a popular song get it DMCA'd.

Software piracy is theft, but what if, as an amateur programmer, I was to re-purpose some of your code? Do we protect the work you did so that creators are properly reimbursed for their efforts, or do we allow a large degree of "remixing" that would allow me to build on your work without restriction, and then for others to build on mine? How do we balance the approach, and who decides how to balance it?