You'd think with all their money they could do a better job than a YouTube channel.

Nope.

No wonder big media is dying.

One more reason why downloading media doesn't bother me too much, despite all the protestations of the big media conglomerates, if put in a similar position they would do it to you in a heartbeat. In some ways my feelings for these companies is kind of like Marv's feelings about hitmen, "No matter what you do to em, you don't feel bad".

Folks, just ignore the trolls. The ignore button is right there. There's a clear distinction between rational counterpoint argument and these guys' bullshit. Over a course of years visiting this site, it has become painfully (literally) clear to me that they are not worth listening to, and it sounds like many of you have reached the same conclusion. They're on my ignore list, but I end up reading their comments anyway because you guys put their comments in quote blocks, which makes me sad.

Now, slightly more on topic, I'm always amazed at how well satire shows like this, The Daily Show, and Colbert produce the most interesting investigatative material. It's an interesting line to walk where they are not performing purely journalistic functions, so they're technically more free to cherry-pick parts of the topic for comedy/satire, but you can also tell they ARE trying to get to the nut of the matter most of the time. Further, the discussions we've been having on this page (the productive posts, at least) illustrate that we're actually holding them to journalistic standards anyway. Or at least argumentative standards; we see the segments of their shows as "not just jokes". What a great format. It also allows them to instead produce whole segments on calling out others (usually Fox) on their journalistic failures, which is an extremely important function but one not undertaken by most of big media.

Sorry for the essay. I like productive contributions on VS because reading the comments on CNN is just worse than YouTube...

Unpopular opinion incoming!

First, full disclaimer: I am not a game developer, but I do write software for a living I'd prefer to be paid (and paid well) for my skills.

Ok, here's the thing. Sorry, but not your stuff. You didn't make it and you don't own it. You own a licence to use it. End of.

I know I'm in the minority here, but I believe not only is a certain amount of DRM acceptable, it's actually unfortunately necessary. I am possibly crazy, but I believe in paying the fucking writer.

Now DRM as it stands is fucking bullshit. *I* paid to watch this motherfucking movie. *i* paid to play this fucking game. Every time you cunts force me sit through a fucking anti -piracy message, it makes me more inclined to pirate your fucking content.

And I don't want to. If I'm buying your game/movie/book, I've already decided your artistic output is worth my time and energy that I put into working. Fuck it, I could have stayed at home and learned to play drums. I've wanted to do that for years, but I don't have the fucking TIME! So you get my time/work/energy.

How fucking dare you waste my precious free time on your sanctimonious fucking ads targeting the very people who don't give a shit about your message, and who, by some perverse twist of natural justice, don't have to put up with your bullshit.

That said.....

"wah, I don't like your DRM" is not a valid excuse to pirate content. If you don't like the way company X distributes your favourite book/game/movie/tv show.... don't consume that content.

No, seriously, (and I'm well aware I'm going to engender a lot of hate for this) if you feel you are entitled to the fruits of someone else's hard work because you don't agree with how it's distributed, then seriously, fuck you. Yeah, I'm not kidding. I don't care if it's WB or HBO or EA or whatever undeniably fucking idiotic big media conglomerate. At some point, a bunch of hard working, talented people created something you want to consume.

PAY THOSE FUCKING PEOPLE.

Or find another way to let those creators know you want their content but not as it's currently available.

If it's awesome, find a way to let them know. If it's shit, don't consume it.

So back to games and drm and copying.

It boils down to this. Buy the games you want. Support the people who are working their arses off because they love what their doing. If you think the new COD is shit (and you're in good company), then don't buy it, don't pirate it and for the love of FSM, don't play it. Your time is valuable. Buy a cheap PC and play FTL or Monaco or Fez or Walking Dead or Mark of the Ninja.... all great games, none of which need a "next gen" (aka 3 or 4 gens ago on the pc) console. Hell, go kickstart Star Citizen.

Fuck it, this is now so long I don't know where or why or how I started.*

Pay the people who make the things you love. They deserve it. They'll make more cool shit. Don't borrow it, don't pirate it. Just, pay them. They get fuck all enough as it is.

* kids! don't write posts drunk after midnight on Saturday after watching the All Blacks crush the French! You will write unpopular opinions and most likely excommunicate yourself from online communities you enjoy!

*related=http://videosift.com/video/George-Carlin-Please-Wake-Up-America

"The real owners are the big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions. Forget the politicians, they're an irrelevancy. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don't. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They've long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the statehouses, the city halls. They've got the judges in their back pockets. And they own all the big media companies, so that they control just about all of the news and information you hear. They've got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying ­ lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want; they want more for themselves and less for everybody else."

"But I'll tell you what they don't want. They don't want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don't want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking. They're not interested in that. That doesn't help them. That's against their interests. They don't want people who are smart enough to sit around the kitchen table and figure out how badly they're getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fucking years ago.

"You know what they want? Obedient workers ­ people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork but just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, reduced benefits, the end of overtime and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it. And, now, they're coming for your Social Security. They want your fucking retirement money. They want it back, so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street. And you know something? They'll get it. They'll get it all, sooner or later, because they own this fucking place. It's a big club, and you ain't in it. You and I are not in the big club."

@renatojj

Church has high interested in religious candidates being elected. Most of the debates going on in politics are based on religious philosophy. Few off the top of my head are abortion, creationism, and women's rights. They've been going against the grain of the Constitution trying to get creationism which is a arguably religion based subject taught in schools. Which in turn possibly gets them more followers, which in turn gets them more tithing and more people in their "group" giving them more power. In fact I would argue they are specifically trying to erode the line between church and state with these arguments, injecting religion based reasons into many of the arguments.

Big media networks push for things like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_Act_of_1996 where the reason for the bill is not actually what ends up happening. It was supposed to deregulate and open up the market for competition and instead it allowed them to reconsolidate by buying up competitors. And they largely don't fight with censorship on curse words because generally it drives off their audience, and those networks that don't have to censor curse words charge for the privilege of hearing them and seeing some nudity to boot. And they also support SOPA-like bills which are essential a blanket tool to censor the web....they also support monitoring and traffic shaping on the networks they control...which is another potential avenue for censorship.

You'll have to be more specific on what you're getting at......all these groups are eroding divisions we built through regulation and have been doing so steadily since the 80s at every opportunity across industries.

I've already shown that given the chance, they buy up competition to remain a monopoly. Look at ISPs, look at all the oil companies we USED to have. Look at the media conglomerates that own the majority of your radio stations ( I think there's two major radio networks, but they have like a million different stations under the same banners so it LOOKS like choice). How the record labels and movie industries are all tied together and often even tied into the same parent company that owns your ISP. Cell phone industry, ATT trying to buy T Mobile which would have brought it down to 3 major providers and they did it in the name of "better service" but still haven't announced plans to build out their infrastructure since the deal went through...why? Because it wasn't about better service, it was about buying up a competitor that offered plans at prices people preferred.

When people are unhappy with their ISPs they've tried to form local government run coop non-profit ISPs, and they get sued by the huge companies who refuse to service their area. It's happened multiple times. With regulation, they would have to provide internet to those places in a timely manner instead of preventing people from doing their own thing.

Did GoDaddy pay dearly for supporting SOPA? I heard they lost 30k subscribers at some point, but did they really? You'll have to show me on that. GoDaddy did lots of terrible things before it, yet they were still a huge provider and still are. They cybersquat on domain names people search for and allow you to buy them at "auction" from them when you try to look up if it's taken or not..they snatch it up to sell to you. They also give away people's domain names with no repercussions and a myriad of other things. Sounds like it needs a regulatory body with some teeth on it to make them act right or shut them down.

Unions are actually a really good way to fight monopolies and under the table deals, but they've been systematically villified. And unions aren't monopolies if they aren't mandatory, and most places are not fully unionized anymore. Often times they will have sections with union employees to do government work and non-union to do non-government work. Non-union guys make half the rate of union guys usually, and have less protections in place to keep themselves from getting shafted. But I don't really see how a union is a monopoly when there are lots of unions and lots of individuals in a union who make decisions for themselves and not as a collective like a company would. IE a company has a "head" that directs it and unions are a collective of individuals. Companies are people after all, unions are not (they are made up of people).

There are laws governing behavior usually based roughly on societal standards. Like pot being illegal is kind of against most of the societies beliefs, yet it remains illegal is an example of where it doesn't quite track. But overall we have laws that say you can't write a check that you know won't cash. Drunk driving, trespassing, vandalism, theft.....yelling fire in a crowded building.......setting off the fire alarm for fun.....etc. Giving people the finger isn't against the law....well probably not in most places so that might fall under social pressure. But we see that social pressure fails miserably at stopping bad behavior, so we have laws to enforce behavior...like not stealing and not murdering. This is society and people holding other people to standards, without the law to judge and convict them by the only thing you have left is personal interpretation and meeting out punishment by each individual or vigilante justice.

If you don't regulate business there is nothing stopping them, because nothing about our market is free. You can't have a free market without perfect information. You can't know every possible thing going on, so you will never have perfect information even if it was possible. So you will have swindlers and knock offs, pyramid schemes, etc. And without laws and regulations on these things, you will never be able to punish the company for what they did in a court of law.

Even if they were 100% above the board honest, they'd still be sourcing their materials from overseas and getting inferior materials to what you are paying for. It happens to the military all the time right now. They buy a bunch of nuts and bolts and some of them are chinese knockoffs that fail well after the installation is done and the machine is in operation. They can't catch them because china is basically lawless when it comes to producing goods for knock off purposes. It could just as easily be a US source doing it if we de-regulated everything and made no way for people to sue them into oblivion...because the damage would be done as soon as you buy a knock off and it fries the rest of your stuff.

The definition of "free market" right now means they want to be able to buy stuff cheap as shit from overseas and charge you US built prices for it. And when it comes to financial industry "free market" means they want to have speculation upon speculation to where the financial industry has 10-100x more money leveraged than what actually exists. It's a house of cards if they can just inflate it without any kind of acceptable risks being enforced.

@Porksandwich all good points. There is corruption and a lot of collusion between government and corporations. Can we consider the possibility that this collusion happens mostly because the role of government is not well defined, because the economy is a grey area, because businesses covet the power politicians have?

I don't see churches fighting over privileges with politicians, not since a clear separation of church and state was established.

I don't see big media networks fighting over censorship rights with politicians, because freedom of speech mostly outlaws censorship by the government.

Do you see where I'm getting at?

The businesses that hold a monopoly, most of the time, hold it because of regulation. If you remove the regulation, you remove the obstacles for competition. The business might still hold the monopoly even for a long while, maybe decades, but any dissatisfaction by consumers is an opportunity for competitors to step in, slowly pushing the monopoly to be more efficient or risk being toppled.

If we dial back regulation, that doesn't mean there won't be any regulation, that the industry will only answer to itself. Regulation will come from consumers, clients, advertisers, consumer groups, unions, shareholders, and competitors. Didn't GoDaddy pay dearly for supporting SOPA? That's a great example of society punishing a business for an unpopular decision.

Besides, we can't consider it unfair for a business to establish a monopoly or a cartel, if we're ok with workers forming a union. That's a double standard because, in essence, they're basically the same thing. I don't judge either to be good or bad, fair or unfair, it's all part of the market and the right for people to freely associate.

You are absolutely right when you say people are held to more standards than just making money, but who establishes those standards? Are there laws dictating that we shouldn't be dicks, that we should never take advantage of others or "negatively impact people"? Those aren't laws, it's social pressure and your reputation that ****regulate**** you to act as a better person.

Let society and people hold businesses to better standards, not laws and politicians.

They also assume that if someone downloaded it, they won't subsequently purchase a legitimate copy... but some of the biggest consumers of channel BT are also the ones who buy the most movies/cd's/downloads too, but only if they liked the downloaded one.

If the big media companies succeed at getting what they want, more people will end up like me... no illegal downloading, but precious little legal downloading or purchasing either.
>> ^kymbos:

The thing I don't get about these estimates of losses due to piracy is that they appear to assume that anyone who downloaded the film/song etc would have paid for it otherwise. That is just not the case.

There will be a little of that. But unfortunately most voters want to pick a "winner" so if the candidate they agree with most is predicted to lose an election they will jump ship and vote for someone else that has a better chance of winning. This is why what they are doing here is so evil. It's bad enough for them to tell voters their candidate doesn't have a chance to win. It's even worse that they are now saying "even if they win, it won't count".>> ^Lethin:

isn't this like the best thing that could happen for ron paul? Big media says "Oh he bad! dont vote for him!" so every kid that hates big media then goes "F U big media! votes for ron!"

isn't this like the best thing that could happen for ron paul? Big media says "Oh he bad! dont vote for him!" so every kid that hates big media then goes "F U big media! votes for ron!"

If stuff like this keeps floating to the surface, it won't matter if Paul wins the election. We are all going to win by undercutting big media, which hurts big government, which is bad for big business. I am cautiously optimistic. My very liberal step-mom texted me today saying something to the effect of becoming a Ron Paul fan, even though she doesn't support his politics, persay. Taking the politics out of government and replacing them with people is the greatest victory I see in the near future. It could fail still, or get hijacked, or the people loose focus (the most likely), but you can either hope or die, so hope it is.

TDS has proven time and again that they are better at digging up self-incriminating footage than the "big" media sources.

Either they have better tools and people... or the "real" media just doesn't bother looking for it.>> ^Yogi:

Soo happy when I saw this. They've got a killer research team to be able to find her talking about the very same subject that far back. Of course if it's just a Lexis Nexis search I'll be quite upset.

I'd call this a *commercial for the website, but it's got some cool information.

Here's a link of interest, describing the "big media" and other corporations:
http://www.freepress.net/ownership/chart/main

That was a very impressive speech by someone who obviously does not speak publicly (constant mic pops from the P sounds and such). And it begins to answer some questions as to why you never see home footage and the "little people" reporting on things, because if the government is going so far as to block big media it should be a small thing to block the little guys from ever gaining popularity.

As for the people not leaving, money might be an issue...but it might be of question of what's going to be left for them when they do and where is it safe to go? If it's already hitting their homes, how far do they have to go to escape it...because the fumes and acid rain coming from it can hit in land. Is leaving the state heading inland enough? Are they in trouble already because they haven't left yet? Will it kill them from the exposure they've had so far?

Plus the whole subject of, if they leave...does that mean they still have a case against BP? Or did they leave for another reason? Because officially at this point in time, no one has released a statement saying what this shit in the water/land/air can do to a person or advised them to do anything.

So if you're potentially terminally sick already and you potentially won't have a case to be made for financial reimbursement and treatment of yourself, kids, and anything you may have lost because of this....why shouldn't you make it your mission in life to fuck BP and those who made it all fall the way it did?

This whole debate is silly. Destroy the legal monopoly status of telco and cable companies and see what happens to them if they adopt a policy that is hostile to openness. They will still have their fair share of "AOL" level users that truly don't understand enough to care. As for the rest of us, there would be a sound of a tornado of people moving to new providers and capital being investing into updating the data bone in this country. I say, bring on your net neutrality hostility big media, for with it, you walk hand in hand with your doom.