[Woodenhead]

If you live outside of the USA (like me) and have half a brain (I know someone who does & will help me) anything like SOPA will be nothing more than a minor annoyance for the first few minutes it is enacted. And it won't do much to piracy at all, other than shuffle some sites around & make it harder to stop.

[Squirrelfighter]

Clearly Dana White has no idea what SOPA contains.

A harvard law professor read the SOPA bill had gave his analysis. In the bill it contradicts its self, this contradiction provides a loop hole through which the government can jail AMERICAN CITIZENS without trial if they are accused of internet piracy.

White is right that the bill's original idea in theory is a good idea. But in application, and by application I mean the redundancy and idiocy of the United States Congress, it has become a microcasm for the internet user's frustrations with the government.

As for the "internet is for cowards" line. Dana White is one of those stupid people who, for one, can't take criticism, and for two, probably doesn't understand how to utilize the internet. Its the same old 2,000 year old story, I don't understand it, therefor I hate it and its evil.

[M_D]

Moving thread to lounge for it has turned from being a discussion about ufc after the first page

[MMA-Matt]

Dana has forgotten that his fanbase has been built through piracy. I myself have been torrenting UFC's but if forced to stop I wouldn't start buying them either. But hey at least because of piracy I've spent $300 at the UFC store so Dana can't complain too much

[joshua7789]

Originally Posted by MMA-Matt

Dana has forgotten that his fanbase has been built through piracy. I myself have been torrenting UFC's but if forced to stop I wouldn't start buying them either. But hey at least because of piracy I've spent $300 at the UFC store so Dana can't complain too much

Their business has been built around and been successful under the PPV model. Thats where they have found the substantial portion of their profits thus far. You illegally watching events doesnt give them shit, no matter what you tell yourself.

[Voiceless]

Originally Posted by Atilak

Props to you

I dont know anyone who has photoshop legally except people that need it for work and make a living by using it.

You don't need Photoshop anyways. If you're not really a specialist that needs it extensively for work, GIMP has almost all the same features as Photoshop, but it's under a free license and, what's important for people concerned about computer security, it's open source, so you can be pretty sure that there are no backdoors in it to collect any data from your computer. The same applies for most major everyday usage software. You can find free licensed open source software (MS Office -> OpenOffice; Outlook -> Mozilla Thunderbird+Lightning; MS Internet Explorer -> Mozilla Firebird etc.) so you actually don't even need to copy commercial software.

Originally Posted by Atilak

I will try to explain it what is wrong with piracy. I used photoshop as the best example I knew. Its price is very high and Im convinced that if all people will be forced to buy it (no piracy) price will go down very hard.

Why would its price go down very hard if people had no other possibility than to buy it¿ That's nonsense. The price is and will stay as high as Adobe can get from its customers. They are no charity organization, they are a commercial enterprise and their goal is to make as much profit as they can, so why should they lower the price¿ No, what lowers the price is competition. As soon as a majority of their customers would stop spending their money for photoshop and buy a competitors product, they'll have to either improve their product or drop the price to make the product more attractive again. That's basic economics.

Originally Posted by Atilak

What is wrong with piracy is that you are just stealing.

Actually, no, technically piracy is NOT stealing. I don't give an opinion whether piracy is right or wrong. There are reasonable arguments against piracy, but it's NOT stealing. If you steal something, it's gone from where it was before and the original owner can't use it anymore. For example, you steal your friends sandwich at work out of his lunchbox, he can't eat it anymore during his work break. But if you copy the music from his CD he recorded at the jam session with his band last night, he's still able to listen to his music.

However, if you start selling the copied music from your friend, THEN you could argue it has similarities to stealing, because people actually spend money which would have gone to your friend if they didn't buy it from you. But it's not the music you stole (you copied it), but the money. That's two different entities.

So, as long as you don't make any profit that would have gone to the original owner, piracy is not stealing, but only copying.

Originally Posted by Atilak

Someone make an effort, put energy in something and you get it for free. That is just wrong.

So you say it's wrong that you get GIMP for free¿ People made an effort and put energy in it. No, right or wrong are no absolute categories. Whether something is right or wrong is a matter of a) agreement and b) point of view.

Originally Posted by Atilak

Anyway you will buy for a lot more things when you dont have other option.

No, not necessarily. That's a misconception (also in the argumentation of the media industry). A person can only buy as much as he has money available. People usually spend most of the money they have available, so if they had no other option than to buy everything, there would only be a change in prioritization for what kind of goods they spend their money on (so maybe some industry might gain, but at the same time other industries would lose), but they won't buy more, because they just can't as they don't have more money. That's what had happened when the music industry claimed that CD copying would make them lose some unreasonable high sums of money. No, it wasn't CD copying. At the same time the music industry began to lose money, there was another industry that gained money, which was the movie industry with their DVD market. A couple of years later, the film industry made the same claims as the music industry, but again the money flow just shifted to a new emerging market, that of the gaming industry. The problem is that the different industries calculate with indefinite money gains, but the available money of their possible customers is finite.

Customers usually don't restrict their money expenses, they just shift it to the most attractive product.

Originally Posted by VolcomX311

North Korea has no internet, their government has banned the whole use and idea of it. We're no North Korea, but to say "any" govermemt would fall short of stopping the internet is inaccurate. China shuts down the internet when necessary to prevent international reporting on whatever uprising they want to keep local, and Egypt just shut down their internet temporarily during the riots this summer. Governments > the internet, it's evidenced in the east and middle east quite often, just because we've not experienced it here doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

Personally, I don't see the internet at its current form in terms of how we "currently" regulate it being stopped or slowed down, but it's not an impossibility in the future, imho.

Yes, governments could shut down the Internet completely, but Western governments won't, because in today's time their economics and infrastructure depends too much on it to work properly. So shutting down the Internet would hurt them more than they would gain from.

[MMA-Matt]

Originally Posted by joshua7789

Their business has been built around and been successful under the PPV model. Thats where they have found the substantial portion of their profits thus far. You illegally watching events doesnt give them shit, no matter what you tell yourself.

...and me not watching events doesn't make them any worse off either.