Way to totally miss the point in  the analogy.  Your post is epic fail.

He's saying they are similar because you aren't denying someone else the right to the service/product, in this case a concert, but rather simply using alternative means, in this case tresspassing, to gain access to said service/product.

In the words of a great comedian, "Next time you have a thought, let it go."

except that they didn't make money by selling the work of others, which you seem to be implying.

They also got something like a million dollars in fines for each of them.

You seem to be missing the point of the matter so I shall attempt to explain: These people DID NOT PIRATE, not directly.  They provided a space which was used to pirate. 

They are not guilty of piracy, they are guilty of facilitating piracy.  People NEED to understand the difference.

In essence, they are guilty of thinking bad thoughts.

They got jail time for thinking that piracy is ok and making it possible for people to pirate, NOT. FOR. PIRATING.

This is not an issue of copyright infringement, it is an issue over whether or not people should be jailed and/or fined for intent over actually committing any crime and whether or not intent is considerable in defining law and punishment.

Well, I did say that they facilitated piracy.

The thing is, in Sweden what they did is legal.  The only thing that they did was know that piracy was taking place.

They provided a space for filesharing.  Not illegal in Sweden, period.  The fact that piracy was going on and they knew about it and probably supported should be irrelevant to their being jailed, but still was the consideration in the verdict.  This is a no different from jailing someone for thinking bad thoughts.

The fact remains that they did not break the law at all.  In your analogy it would be akin to placing a loaded gun on a table and watching someone you don't know come in a take it, later to murder somebody with it.

By your reasoning anybody who sells a gun to someone else is potentially an accessory to murder.  Don't forget that we're talking about another country with another set of laws.

You do realize maintaining a web page (and coding the "peer" feeder itself) while hosting it in the virtual space isn't intent, do you?

I can only repeat my earlier question to PROVE there are plenty of software solutions for anyone willing to grab a whole bunch of money from online users paypal'ing their ways into monthly costs; Any Rapidshare Premium Zone users, here?

Law(s) must be enforced in a court of Justice... can you count how many such systems are in the world, right now?

Identify who's interests they are protecting?

What if anything could CONSTITUTIONALLY favor both sides of a very complex equation simply because it has no global meaning or impact?

UN should step in, rather than chasing War Criminals "only" to bring the process in The Hague -- they must start thinking about what the economic consequences are in terms of actual worldwide recession conditions. They must evaluate what the honest or optimal Industrial/Consuming ratio is or was actually decaying ever since Piracy of products came into existence.

Businesses will shut down forever if nothing gets done at the International level.

The only good pirate (including those who justify 'trying out a game before purchasing' by using torrents, not demos) is a pirate who has been hurtled into outer space on a missle bound for Saturn; with no space suit.

For the worst and an upcoming collapse of industrialization itself.

As a result, markets are still plunging. Jobs are lost. Unemployment rates inching their statistics above 15% in a few countries. Record deficits.

World food bank warning of famines. Give too much money to the rich, they'll spend it. Make any GM cars with tax-payers funds. Protect investors rather than population_S.

Gee, how pessimistic?

Truth & facts - observe if you dare.

Some of us thinks there's still hope yet for humanity. Cuz, it makes sense.

Says the guy that lives in a country where the law is ignored on a regular basis by judges.  We have judges letting child molesters off the hook because it's just a lifestyle choice and they didn't really rape that ten year old, but I'm just being dramatic.

Says the guy who claimed someone else failed civics.

The pretty bumper sticker is that "We have a government of laws, not men." The vexing truth is that all laws are language constructs, inevitably bound to constant interpretation in a given moment and also subject to the evolution of languages and cultures in the long term. The so-called "strict constructionists" have just found an interesting way to brand their agenda space when it comes to arguing law. Seriously, when the framers built the original US Constitution, spelling (and capitalization, for that matter) was a matter of taste and breeding, not print-based lexical authority. Daniel Webster was a child when the bleeding thing was ratified.

But I digress. There's less than nothing wrong with pillorying a judge because you disagree with the ruling, but there's nothing at all helpful in flinging around rhetorical shorthand that asserts there is some simple, unchanging basis for law. Law is complicated even in non-democratic systems, and when you let the demos into the courts, it just gets messier. Permanently, if the demos is lucky.

I actually just realized I linked the wrong article. 

Oops.  I was googling for one that I remembered reading and thought was good, and saw the picture of Johnny Depp and assumed it was the same article, but it wasn't.  I actually agree that Bruce's article is mostly crap.... I should have checked my links.  Sorry I put you through reading that. *facepalm*

The one I was actually thinking of was this one: http://www.tweakguides.com/Piracy_1.html

It's a much more balanced view, with actual data.  I would highly suggest it.

Yeah, I know, that's what I said.  My main question was this:

Which you mostly answered with:

I'm not sure this is sustainable.  Hulu currently works economically because the major networks get most of their funding from actual TV and the ad sponsors they have there.  They put up Hulu to capture a share of the pirate market, who wasn't watching commercials anyway.  Hulu isn't an attempt to capture existing regular TV watchers or people who love hi-def; if they all switched over, the major networks would collapse.  How much will a company pay for one or two short Hulu ads?  Is that revenue enough to sustain high budget shows like Lost?  Right now, I doubt it.  There's also a bigger problem, in that even though you seem ok with watching a small amount of ads, the majority of pirates will still complain of any ads at all, and just pirate the TV show rather than watching it on something like Hulu.  That's what TV pirates are currently doing now.

And I'm still wondering what the solution would be for games.  You can't give them away for free.  And asking for donations is not going to work.  Should games be ad-supported too?  I don't want them to be.  I'd rather buy them.

I think the biggest issue with this is that the ruling does not stop the site. The piracy will go on, as will ad revenues etc.

They /technically/ had nothing other than a website hosted. They didn't actually store any files. I mean, I see all these people celebrating a huge win and victory against piracy, but really, this isn't it. This doesn't stop piracy, it isn't even a blow to piracy. Four people, who don't have the money to pay if they wanted too were given jail time but nothing was done about the reason or the crime.

As it was said:

They were an Acessory to piracy, the problem with that is- they were as much an acessory to piracy as a cars salesman is to drunk driving. By selling cars the salesman provides the means for drunk driving. By hosting the servers, they provided the means for piracy. 

What sort of implication does this have?

What about single player games?  If the only way to make any money is to make people play online, then you're going to end up with crippled single-player campaigns with all the effort going into multiplayer.  And once that happens, people will feel the need to pirate multiplayer and use private servers because the smaller single-player focus will be "crap".

This is sort of the trend now in PC gaming.  The publishers have started to agree that online-only games with strong user authorization are the only way to make money in the PC market.  That's not a good thing in my mind.  I like single-player games.

That would require strong DRM, and everyone (pirates and nonpirates) go on and on and on about how much they hate DRM.  Legitimate customers would hate to have to constantly log on to the internet and have the game track the amount of time they play.  I know I would hate it; I'd much rather just buy the game and have it.  Plus, this would be fairly easy to crack.

Professional 3D software is MASSIVELY pirated... almost every home user who uses it has a pirated copy.  The 3D software companies make their money almost entirely by selling to other businesses.  Business software is easier to sell, because other businesses don't want to break the law; they need to keep records of their expenses and be able to enforce their own copyright when they make art or games.

But in game terms, what you're describing is a demo.  There are lots of games with demos, and some that have timed trials.  They still are massively pirated, because the pirates think they shouldn't have to pay for the game at all because it's "crap" and "buggy" and "half-finished", or that it's made by an evil greedy corporation who deserves to be stolen from.  I thought the whole thing you were arguing against (at least what most pirates are arguing against) is the entire concept of having to pay for games.  If all you want are more demos, then maybe you should ask the companies you like to provide them, rather than stealing their products.

Well, they ARE adapting.  That's what DRM, online-only, and moving everything off of PC and to the consoles is.  But pirates don't seem to actually want them to "adapt", they seem to want them to give away everything for free.

Well, they ARE adapting.  That's what DRM, online-only, and moving everything off of PC and to the consoles is.  But pirates don't seem to actually want them to "adapt", they seem to want them to give away everything for free.

To put it fondly, "They're doing it wrong".

Seriously, DRM has driven me off certain products. If I buy I a game, I want to run it 10 years from now, I want to install it as many times as I need too and I want to be able to play it while I'm travelling on my laptop.

Pirates? DRM, Online only, all of that doesn't stop pirates. It just hurts loyal customers. I haven't seen a single game produced by anyone that didn't get pirated if it was tried. Online or not, even WoW is pirated. Trying to stop pirates from cracking your game is the wrong way to approach it, you have to always (as Stardock assumes) that there will be people who will always pirate games. Always. And from there, you have to consider A. How to get as much of the paying base to pay, and B. How to get those pirates who would pay, to pay. 

In the case of A. It's making a good game, with good solid adveritisng. In the case of B, you don't need advertising so much as you need a good game and well, to be honest some luck. If someone just bought another game, chances are you're going to get the buck passed over you.