"Richy Boy"? Yeesh.
Of
course you're going to get laughed at for buying your games on a
spanish scene site filled to the brim with pirates. That's sad, but expected. I don't deny that there are a ton of other scene sites, loads of pirated files on file storage sites, and masses of illegal torrents everywhere. Nobody with a modicum of sense would deny that.
But we seem to be misunderstanding each other somewhat. For instance, what is your definition of a "pirate"? From your last post, I get the feeling that you label all those involved in the act, uploader and downloader both, as pirates, and I can't really dispute that. It then comes down to how the law defines piracy - as
the unauthorized copying and distribution of copyrighted materials, none of which a leecher consciously does (unless they're using torrents, but we'll get to that later).
See, when I think of piracy, I think of the actual illegal act of copying and distribution, without which there would be no files to download, and therefore, no leechers. Your own graph shows the truth of that, does it not? Without any content, Mininova simply fizzled into irrelevance. That's the nature of the beast - the leechers go where the content is. It's the same with all piracy - you need there to be something to get in order for people to get it. That's why the copying and distribution/uploading is the true illegal act - because from there, all other iniquities spring forth. The people who do that -
they're the real pirates.
That's my point - there's a tiny minority of real pirates out there uploading copyrighted materials of all kinds to a huge mass of leechers, but, even so, their numbers pale in comparison to the legal user community that neither uploads or downloads illegally copied files. Believe it or not, most people
obey the law. It's just the way they were brought up to be. You may have had the misfortune to meet and work with some people whose moral fiber is...
differently woven, let's say, but that does not mean that those people are the majority. It just means you've been unlucky.
Raist said:
The sole intended purpose of geohot's patch and keys release is to circumvent security measures preventing unauthorized installation and signing stuff not licensed in the first place, yes. Now I never said that the sole purpose was piracy. It's a different thing.
Incorrect. Geohot's patch - for that's all it is, a patch, since the firmware is otherwise untouched - only makes it possible to install your own applications to the PS3. That's it. It doesn't even help them run - the leaked keys do that. It's a tool, just like BitTorrent and C++, and it can be used for both good and ill purposes. Now comes the question - Raist, would you be in favour of making geohot's patch illegal simply because it can be used to install apps that, if illegitimately used, could facilitate piracy/cheating?
In the patch's case, it's not even the tool itself being used illegally, but another
separate tool being used illegally. It's like someone using BitTorrent to download public domain blueprints for an amateur rocket, then using those blueprints as the base from which to design and build a mortar grenade. Or someone using C++ to write a program to make it easier to create widgets for a particular website, which someone then uses to write malware. If that makes any sense.
Anyway, BitTorrent is still legal because, despite being used for illegal purposes by a lot of people,
it's just a tool that does have legitimate uses - hell, Blizzard uses their own BT client to distribute their World Of Warcraft and StarCraft II files to their customers' hard drives, and I'm sure a lot of other companies use it as well. File storage sites like MegaUpload are still legal for the same reasons, despite the tons of illegal files on their servers - in the end, they're just tools. The same way that geohot's patch is just a tool. Hell, it doesn't even use any Sony-copyrighted code!
Tools can't be made illegal just because bad people can use them. That's a simple enough principle to understand, isn't it?
CFW doesn't pirate PS3 games, pirates do!