ISOHUNT in trouble?

The thing with a website like that is that it in itself is not doing anything wrong, nor even facilitating anything wrong.

It is there to provide a service to host items that other use the site to look for, and download. Because he does not monitor each and every thing uploaded, he cannot screen them for illegal content. Nor is that his responsibility.

I agree that they should go after the source of the Pirates, not their hosts. They will just make new ones and hurt guys like him, who may have no interest in piracy.

The companies are too eager to squeeze every last dime out of us, particularly the music/movie corporations. I think that they need to chill out, and try lowering their prices a little. I bet they will find that they get more revenue for it.

~Lordbob

Wishmaster said:

I have somewhat the same view as many others here although some may disagree.

I think though, If i take a bluray movie I legally own, rip it to my Hard drive and recode for my Media Center library, I do not think this is (or should be) a issue. Seeing as I legally purched and own the original, it is in my possession and its personal use only.

However, by burning copies (even though its easily done) and giving them away for free (or selling), then its wrong.

+1 exactly.

~Lordbob

Legal tit for tat aside:

We are starting to witness the tangible evidence that it's the 'beginning of the end' for torrents as an easy distribution method.

The anti-piracy juggernaut is undeniably gaining momentum. Ultimately though, it's a massive waste of time and money as Piracy isn't going anywhere.

There's point where I agree some not.
For exemple, I am a eurobeat fan. If it weren't of piracy, I wouldn't have able to hear anything of this niche genre that only is widely known in Japan. Same thing for my favorite rock band B'z. And, now, today, when I can, I buy Eurobeat (importing physical CDs...) and buy my fav. band's CDs too and that's thanks to piracy.

Pros and cons of piracy :
Pros :
- Discover music/software
- Fully try before buying
- Evaluate quality/price ratio.
- Save money on things if quality or liking quantity/price isn't fair. (ex. like 1 song on an album of 15 tracks)
- Etc.

Cons :
- If you don't end up buying, you don't encourage the maker (and all those that are linked to the product)
- Disrespect of law
- Etc.

Canada and piracy... this is a love story (really!). Canada haven't made anything against piracy in the last decade. Well, they did stop people that were actually selling pirated copies but not particular people downloading and sharing some stuff. In fact, torrenting in Canada is legal... the content is not but rarely anyone get caught. That is because we are on a low rank in the piracy world compared to other countries.

Also, I have this mentality. As soon that what you download or upload is for personal use it's OK. Pirating OSes is NOT ok (you get more problems than anything else).

Also, it seems that music labels or software makers fails to adapt with the Internet. They KNOW that people is going to share it. So why aren't they trying to find a solution around it. And yet, there is a VERY simple solution : taxing Internet. Adding an additional 15% to your Internet bill that would be given to the major music and software maker would totally solve everything.

Let's make a quick calculation :
My Internet connection costs 64.90$/month.
Apply the taxes... 64.90*1.05 = 68.145 * 1.075 = 73.26$/m (yes, tax on tax here...)
Now apply the copyright tax : 73.26 * 1.15 = 84.24$/m
Difference between the prices... 84.24 - 73.26 = 10.98$ from me to the major music/software publisher.

Now, imagine that 1 million people has the same connection and pays the same price than me...
10.98$ * 1000000 = 10,980,000$/m That's 10 millions ninety eight thousand dollars!!
And on a year :
131,760,000$$!!! And now, span this over multiple countries... 'nuf said.

But one thing though ; the faster the connection the higher the tax is because habitually the speedier the connection is to someone's home the higher the probability that he actually download something illegally. Exemple : someone on 56k has less chance to be pirating (slow speed, can't phone, uses Internet rarely) than someone with 20Mbits down and 10mbits up connection.
56k : 1% tax.
up to 512kbits : 3%
up to 1Mbits : 5% (consumer); no tax (company)
up to 7Mbits : 10% (consumer); 0,5% (company)
up to 10Mbits : 15% (me) (consumer); 1% (company)
up to 50Mbits : 20% (consumer); 2% (company)
Faster than 50Mbits : 25% (consumer); 3% (company)

That would cure every copyright problems and keep Internet neutrality!
But, after all that, I still know that the best is to buy the product but imagine the person that wants an album and can't afford it... especially if there is only one song he/she likes.

Lebon14 said:

There's point where I agree some not.
For exemple, I am a eurobeat fan. If it weren't of piracy, I wouldn't have able to hear anything of this niche genre that only is widely known in Japan. Same thing for my favorite rock band B'z. And, now, today, when I can, I buy Eurobeat (importing physical CDs...) and buy my fav. band's CDs too and that's thanks to piracy.

Pros and cons of piracy :
Pros :
- Discover music/software
- Fully try before buying
- Evaluate quality/price ratio.
- Save money on things if quality or liking quantity/price isn't fair. (ex. like 1 song on an album of 15 tracks)
- Etc.

Cons :
- If you don't end up buying, you don't encourage the maker (and all those that are linked to the product)
- Disrespect of law
- Etc.

Canada and piracy... this is a love story (really!). Canada haven't made anything against piracy in the last decade. Well, they did stop people that were actually selling pirated copies but not particular people downloading and sharing some stuff. In fact, torrenting in Canada is legal... the content is not but rarely anyone get caught. That is because we are on a low rank in the piracy world compared to other countries.

Also, I have this mentality. As soon that what you download or upload is for personal use it's OK. Pirating OSes is NOT ok (you get more problems than anything else).

Also, it seems that music labels or software makers fails to adapt with the Internet. They KNOW that people is going to share it. So why aren't they trying to find a solution around it. And yet, there is a VERY simple solution : taxing Internet. Adding an additional 15% to your Internet bill that would be given to the major music and software maker would totally solve everything.

Let's make a quick calculation :
My Internet connection costs 64.90$/month.
Apply the taxes... 64.90*1.05 = 68.145 * 1.075 = 73.26$/m (yes, tax on tax here...)
Now apply the copyright tax : 73.26 * 1.15 = 84.24$/m
Difference between the prices... 84.24 - 73.26 = 10.98$ from me to the major music/software publisher.

Now, imagine that 1 million people has the same connection and pays the same price than me...
10.98$ * 1000000 = 10,980,000$/m That's 10 millions ninety eight thousand dollars!!
And on a year :
131,760,000$$!!! And now, span this over multiple countries... 'nuf said.

But one thing though ; the faster the connection the higher the tax is because habitually the speedier the connection is to someone's home the higher the probability that he actually download something illegally. Exemple : someone on 56k has less chance to be pirating (slow speed, can't phone, uses Internet rarely) than someone with 20Mbits down and 10mbits up connection.
56k : 1% tax.
up to 512kbits : 3%
up to 1Mbits : 5% (consumer); no tax (company)
up to 7Mbits : 10% (consumer); 0,5% (company)
up to 10Mbits : 15% (me) (consumer); 1% (company)
up to 50Mbits : 20% (consumer); 2% (company)
Faster than 50Mbits : 25% (consumer); 3% (company)

That would cure every copyright problems and keep Internet neutrality!
But, after all that, I still know that the best is to buy the product but imagine the person that wants an album and can't afford it... especially if there is only one song he/she likes.

This is all well and good, but does the end justify the means? No, even if the end result is good, the way you got there isn't. Regardless of how stupid and non-sensible these laws are, we need to obey them.

pparks1 said:

However, in the last 5 years, we have seen an explosion of free software and open source software which can freely be used which doesn't need to be paid for. And these are solid applications as well (antivirus apps, cd/dvd burning apps, virtualization apps, music ripping apps, office applications, graphics applications, partitioning tools, backup and image software, etc)

For me personally, piracy of software stopped when I didn't feel it necessary to have the commercial applications. So, now I use free software almost exclusively and when I feel that the free software doesn't cut it and I require the commercial app...then I am willing to pay for the commercial app.

A great example would be Open Office. However, this is a good example two ways:
1) It does EXACTLY what MSOffice does.
2) Very few people actually know about it.

That is the main problem with open source/freeware. Most people just don't know about them. As long as MS Office comes bundled with new computers and is advertised, there will never be a large following for Linux/open source.
The other main problem (leading more towards Linux), is that most software development is done for Windows, because that is the most used OS...
You see where that is heading?

While I agree that freeware is almost always the best substitute, it will just not be as well known.
(Now, how can we change that?)

~Lordbob